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EZTHEWASHINGTONPOST.
FRIDAY,JULY31, 2020more that six feet across, close
enough to human scale to stir the
uncanny sense you are one of
them too — divorced, for a sec-
ond, from whatever practical ob-
ligations you once had, freed to
roam in your mental associa-
tions, just another nondescript
body perched on a puddle of
infinity.
Dark Star Park has been called
Virginia’s Stonehenge. But Holt
rejected this characterization of
her work, noting her use of indus-
trial materials and “big bulldoz-
ers.” Assembled without con-
struction equipment, Stonehenge
honors a celestial event: the sol-
stices. The park, by comparison,
is distinctly modern — perhaps
even distinctly American — using
a celestial event (the position of
the sun) to honor a capitalist
concept: a successful real estate
investment.
Thirty-six years on, commemo-
rating a white man’s land acquisi-
tion can feel antiquated at best.
But Holt’s creation has supersed-
ed the history it commemorates.
An Arlington County website lists
Aug, 1 as Dark Star Park Day, not
Rosslyn Day.
It’s not inconceivable that
Holt, if she were around to hear
them, would share in some of the
contemporary criticism of the art
world. Land art — be it Maya Lin’s
Vietnam Memorial, a vee-shaped
gash in the earth, or Lita Albu-
querque’s blood red trenches that
temporarily turned the shadow
cast by the Washington Monu-
ment into a giant calendar —
draws from the space around it in
a way that art in a white-walled
gallery can’t. Holt liked how the
surrounding environment al-
tered her work over time, ques-
tioning what she called “the ide-
alism of interior space” and seek-
ing to respond to the psychosocial
pulse of a place.
In Utah, Holt’s “Sun Tunnels”
function like telescopes or camer-
as, cropping the picturesque des-
ert into digestible snapshots. In
Rosslyn, Dark Star Park does just
the opposite: It works like a
microscope.
With its generic chain stores
and mirrorlike glass architecture,
Rosslyn sometimes seems like it’s
trying to disappear. The tunnels
of Dark Star Park, which frame
buildings and crosswalks along
with the spheres, suggest that
what Holt called a “cold, distant”
urban landscape is worth a closer
look. Here, under her viewfinder,
a sliver of city seems expansive,
sprawling.
Holt’s work — particularly on
this one day of the year — re-
minds us that even when one day
seems indistinguishable from the
next, the universe’s unhurried
motion is still visible all around,
in the slow shifting of sightlines
and shadows.[email protected]water, and its meandering path-
ways, feels less like a dreamy
retreat from Rosslyn’s corporate
activity than a natural extension
of a covid-19 world, in which
emptied buildings are more like
decorative sculptures, and once-
lively business districts succumb
to listlessness.
Holt nudges visitors toward a
timeless state by redirecting our
attention. Peering through the
smaller of two tunnels — one of a
pair of culvert-like structures in
the park — you might think you
see nothing. An imposing sphere
eclipses the view, leaving only a
moon-like crescent of park land-
scape visible. But the sphere, too,
is the view. Its shadows change
color and position as the sun and
clouds move overhead.
When looking at the five
spheres, the park’s name conjures
cosmic bodies: retired moons;
fallen stars; tiny, forgotten plan-
ets. But Holt has said they could
be anything. On a recent swelter-
ing morning, the sandpaper-like
spheres look as if they might have
simply rolled off the buildings
around them, like beads of giant,
concrete perspiration. Two areDARK STAR FROM 12MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POSTMICHAEL ROBINSON-CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POSTTOP: Although the streets of Rosslyn are quieter than usual because of the pandemic, visitors are still
enjoying Dark Star Park. ABOVE: Connie McAdam, center, with Bill Brakefield, waits for the shadows
of the sculptures to align in 2000. It only happens at a specific moment each year.