The Texas Blackland Prairie—the ecoregion where Dallas is located—is the most endangered large ecosystem in North America (currently, less than 1% remains). Sweet Pass Sculpture School artists conducted a broad survey of this lost prairie, exploring remnant parcels in the Clymer Meadow and Frankford Church and the manufactured prairie of the GW Bush library. They examined how Dallas' construction has shaped its surrounding ecology and how the city incorporates nature into its tangled mass. The works presented respond to this contemporary environment, ranging from self-contained sculptural objects to landscape interventions and movement-based performance video.

In prairie landscapes, bottomlands appear as depressions in the earth, sunken and soggy places sitting at a river's edge. The artists in Sculpture School found home in that metaphor, sinking their toes into the mire of the overlooked, unseen, and unloved. Physically and metaphorically mining the landscape, the artists in Bottomland present alternative understandings of the local, from monuments to native flora. Formal aspects of the show draw on extractive and additive methods used in the construction of the built environment, redefining topographies, installing announcement systems, and placing signage to direct traffic through the space. Performing burned prairie as spiritual rebirth, hybridizing gilgai as cardinal directors, and highlighting the mechanized maintenance of designed landscapes, the works interweave with the park to create a complex ecology of collective inquiry.

An empty desk, recreated in plywood, appears as a low poly rendering in the landscape. A photograph of the Southfork Ranch, the location for the soap opera Dallas, is flowing across the surface. Birdseed encrusted armatures hold a sprinkler system that operates in 15 minute intervals. As the sprinklers sputter to life and fan across the ground, the desk becomes a sort of Manneken Pis. Accompanying the water feature, a broken monologue cheerfully illustrates the opportunity and pleasure that a nameless future development will bring. The royalty free music and soothing voice shower the space before falling away and being absorbed back into the landscape. Named for the over-the-counter color used to paint the desk, Coffee Beans by Susana Oliveros Amaya, is a humorous and poignant comment on the seemingly ceaseless development of North Texas.

Brook-Lynne Clark’s Big Tex is Burning (6:47) is a three channel video work installed inside Sweet Pass’s new media space SP2. Tightly interwoven like the monumental Texas highways, Clark intuitively collages found imagery, music, the body, and footage shot in shopping malls. Through a series of fleeting glimpses, superimposed performers glitch over the landscape and bloom across screens. The figure dances first in prairie scenes, then fire, before multiplying across the built environment. Partially shot and produced with the artist’s phone, there is a feeling of immediacy and provisional tension. The density of imagery across three channels is impossible to take in in total — leaving the viewer to navigate the sprawl of ideas and narratives across multiple viewings.

Three Porta Potty sculptures and their shocks of blue sit at varying depths within the foliage of the park. In a takeaway zine featured in “Bottomland”, Dunne writes: “In Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi and Denise Brown wrote that Las Vegas architecture is distinguished in part by its “rhetorical facade and conventional behind.” It occured to me that the inverse might be said of cruising architecture.” At first glance this trilogy of sculptures can be read as a one-liner about the qualities of Phillip Johnson’s JFK Memorial which resembles a bathroom stall. However, this wink becomes a framing device for a set of interiors which reveal so much more.

Carved from a single piece of cedar, Emily Lee’s Four Floods and Drawing for a City Public reaches nearly 14 feet into the canopy. At the top, a sand casted aluminum hoop, craggy and charged, supports a stained glass monocle which overlooks the ground below. In total, the form resembles a freehand sketch of an iconic Dallas building on the tail end of the skyline across the river. Reunion Tower built in the late 70’s sits just 1000 feet from where JFK was assassinated. Its geodesic exoskeleton holds an animated LED matrix, while the ball contains a dance club, a rotating restaurant, and an observation deck to showcase the tower’s panoramic views of the surrounding landscape. The building’s name itself is a reference to a flash-in-the-pan 19th century socialist commune, La Reunion, whose historic boundaries include the present day park. Additionally, Lee’s installation features a series of pit fired ceramic vessels which are buried flush with the ground. A compass rose, gilgai, or shadows of overhead planes – this series of X’s pockmark the ground, collecting water from prairie rains and tracking the shadows of her vertical sculpture.

Tucked into the back of the park sits a hole larger than a grave but smaller than a swimming pool. Dug by the artist with an excavator, Schlumberger’s gesture reveals the soil horizon down to the sandy loam of a prehistoric river bottom. The ground pulled open with the teeth of a tool reflects a historical refrain on the face of the prairie. It also mirrors the rapid development which surrounds the park and region. Bracketing the hollow, a series of signs narrate your encounter; The Approach, The Descent, The Hole, The Climb, The View, and The Marker. Part roadside attraction, part park interpretation — the signs codify the experience of the hole without prescribing explicit meaning. Instead, their installation calls attention to the ways in which we frame and transact with nature and place.

A drawing in two-by-fours, House Down, Panicum Virgatum traces the shadows cast by the adjacent SP2 house. Built to the height of the house’s foundation, this skewed, minimal form also references its internal structure. The doors and windows are packed with cracked earth, inverting the mirrored voids into vessels. The remaining area is planted with “Heavy Metal” switchgrass seed, a native plant of the Texas Blackland Prairie — harnessing the duration of the exhibition and creating an ongoing conversation within the landscape.

Sweet Pass Sculpture Park is a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization which provides space and support for experimental and large-scale outdoor projects by a diverse set of contemporary voices. Founded in 2018 by Tamara Johnson and Trey Burns, as an extension of their own art practices, they envision this project growing to be a permanent space for temporary projects. Geographically located in a one acre lot in west Dallas, Sweet Pass exists in the gaps between ideas of gardens, green spaces, and public spaces while supporting contemporary art dedicated to site, experimentation, and community engagement.