An eerie landscape of empty desks will occupy a 3,600-square-foot swath on the east side of Manhattan in Madison Square Park Conservancy’s latest exhibition set to open this January.

The exhibition was announced Tuesday by the Conservancy, which selected Hugh Hayden as the 42nd artist to receive the commission which dates back to 2004. Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest is currently on view in the park after being installed in late May.

Hayden’s installation called Brier Patch connects 100 wooden elementary school desks via a network of twisting tree branches that layer meaning and complexity onto the tangled sculptural mass meant as a metaphor for several attendant societal ills. It takes cues from children’s folklore and is reminiscent of the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial. The Conservancy’s Brooke Rapaport called it “visually powerful and loaded with inherent tensions—growth and stagnation, seduction and peril, individual and community—that ask us to consider how these dichotomies coexist in society and the work.” 

“In [this] project, the overgrown configuration of branches overwhelms and encumbers the placidity of seats of childhood learning. He transforms everyday objects into new composite forms that expose the properties and background of the original source,” the curator said. 

The artist chose the briar patch as a metaphor specifically because of its brittle and unforgiving structure, the passage through which causes guaranteed harm for all but a few in a process that Hayden compares to public education. The constricting entanglement serves also as a metaphor for the crippling burden of student loan debt. Hayden says he drew on Joe Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus chronicles for inspiration. 

The exhibition was organized by Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Deputy Director and Martin Friedman Chief Curator; Tom Reidy, Deputy Director, Finance and Special Projects; and Curatorial Manager Truth Murray-Cole. Brier Patches will open to the public on January 18th and run through April 29th. More information on Madison Square Park Conservancy’s arts program can be found here.