Inside the Bermuda Triangle

A new installation by Bermuda-based architect and artist John Gardner BArch 81 is stealing the show – the Bermuda Biennial 2014: A View from the Edge, that is – with ripple effects felt as far away as the offices of The New York Times.

His piece Triangle – a collaboration with dancer/choreographer Anna Clifford and spoken word poet Tiffany Paynter – features projections of Clifford inside a massive water-filled triangle and celebrates the 50^th anniversary of the pulp magazine story that launched the island’s best-known bit of cultural lore: the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle.

“During the past two decades alone, this sea mystery at our back door has claimed almost 1,000 lives,” the original Argosy article proclaimed. “In this series of disasters, not one body has ever been recovered… .”

After scaling back his architectural practice a bit, Gardner has made space to make art again and says he designed Triangle for the biennial to “explore themes of place, explanation, culture and relationships, all within a mystical context.”

Gardner’s proposed geo-markers would delineate the triangle’s corners.

In hopes of making the three points of the legendary triangle “a tripartite destination,” Gardner wants to place sculptural “geo-markers” in Bermuda, Miami and Puerto Rico and encourage these three “cultural communities” to “positively embrace their relationship as defined by the triangle, transcend its origins and redefine [it] as a modern construct based on mutual identity.”

Triangle remains on view through November 22 at the Bermuda National Gallery East in St. Georges.