Elmhurst Art Museum’s Skycube, 2015, celebrates ten years

By Maureen Callahan

Want to look down at the sky? It’s possible to do just that in the Skycube Plaza of the Elmhurst Art Museum. Now celebrating its tenth anniversary, Skycube, 2015 brings views from above down to eye level, in real time. Edge up close to it and look down. You’ll see airplanes lazily weaving through floating clouds and the pastels of sunset, as the skyscape changes with the hour. At night, it’s a live picture of moving stars.

Essentially, you’re looking down to look up. Spectators approach the 8 ft x 8 ft x 8 ft cube and look onto an approximately 45-degree angled mirror that reflects the sky. It’s as though the real-life picture is moving through a frame of white painted steel in front of you. The result is a fascinating look at the sky above, which changes with the time of day – a blue sky early on gives way to a pitch-black star scape after nightfall.

Skycube, 2015’s placement in the art museum’s outdoor concrete setting is the perfect juxtaposition of nature – the sky – contained in steel and standing on a concrete plane. This piece is very intentionally placed across from Mies Van Der Rohe’s McCormick House. Local artist, David Wallace Haskins, intended the piece to be placed in its exact location so the two structures would appear to be having a conversation.

A limestone bench placed exactly 16 feet from the front center of Skycube, 2015, offers spectators the perfect spot to rest as they reflect on their presence against the vastness of the sky. The experience invites contemplation of the unique presence of each of us in an enormous universe.

Haskins’ work aims to combine the abstractness of life, space, and time utilizing components of psychology, ecology, physics and philosophy. He has certainly achieved it in Skycube, 2015. ■