A nearby sign reads

FJORWARD
Christine Corday
Weathering Steel

The Hudson River is a fjord that was carved by ancient ice flows, and moves both north and south. This is abstracted by a circular band that is held in tension by two directional plates, separated by an inch of air. It represents a continuous carving of time and space, just as the ice flow did millennia before. The weathered Cor-ten steel is reminiscent of Peekskill’s historic iron foundries. “Fjorward” phonetically echoes the natural history of the site, but also symbolizes human progress as people move through the sculpture – one visitor at a time.

2014

According to Wikipedia:

Christine Corday (born in 1970, Laurel, Maryland) is an American painter and sculptor. Her work draws from earlier studies in astronomy, cultural anthropology, chemistry, and sensory perception science. Corday’s artistic approach consist of manipulation of matter into different states, producing massive sculptures that viewers are meant to experience through touch, leaving memories on the surface of her work. Her works are found in private international collections: Paris, Madrid, Dublin, Tokyo, Los Angeles, San Miguel de Allende, Dubai, Brussels, Washington DC, and New York City. With Corday’s first solo exhibition: PROTOIST SERIES: SELECTED FORMS, presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

‘Launching Ball’ by Korean artist Jong Oh (aluminum, stainless steel, paint. 19 x 6.5 x 8 feet (580 x 200 x 245 cm ). 2014

According to the Marc Straus Gallery

The Korean artist Jong Oh (born in 1981) creates site-specific spatial installations. He carefully approaches a particular setting and responds to the given spatial situation through his works. Oh describes this process as follows: “Responding to a site’s nuanced configuration, I build spatial structures by suspending Plexiglas and painted strings in the air. These elements connect or intersect with one another, depending on the viewers’ perspectives. Viewers walk in and around these paradoxical boundaries constituted by three-dimensionality and flatness, completion and destruction. The viewers’ experience becomes a meditation on perception’s whim.”

In these compositions, Oh makes use of a limited selection of materials: string, fishing line, Plexiglas, and wooden rods. The strings are sometimes painted on one side and are thus visible from one side only or almost entirely invisible. By constantly arranging these materials anew, Oh adds the suggestion of additional dimensions to the three-dimensional space. Lights and shadows extend these configurations by offering visual effects so that the highly fragile works resemble optical illusions of falling perspectives. In this dialogue of lines and planes, Oh is testing the limits of visibility. The works require an increased awareness of delicate oscillations and variations. Jong Oh is thus clearly making a case for an attention to small details, especially in the hectic bustle of everyday life. In a highly formal language that is almost completely free of narrative moments, Oh appeals above all to the viewers’ experience of the world. Alternating between sculpture and intervention, intangible image and installation, Oh considers each of his works as a carefully composed visual poem: “The works become subtle and restrained visual poems. Each only a few lines long, but addressing the universal.”

Jong Oh was born in 1981 in Mauritania, North Africa and moved to Korea at age 15 earning his BFA from Hongik University in Seoul and eventually his MFA from School of Visual Art in New York, where he now lives and works. He had a recent 2016 solo exhibition at the University of Connecticut Art Galleries. In 2014-5 he has had solo exhibitions at Krinziger, Austria; Jochen Hempel, Leipzig; and MARSO, Mexico City. He has been in numerous group exhibits worldwide. In 2011, Oh was one of 12 artists in FIRST LOOK at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, a juried show of leading art graduates in the US. In 2014 he won a competition to create a large scale public installation along the Hudson River in Peekskill, New York.

Oh talks about his philosophy and process in this video.

A 2000 piece by Olafur Eliasson. I found this to be the most fascinating artwork I came across in the Peekskill River Walk Park – and I almost missed it. From a distance it looks like a bright blue container. Only when you get up to it do you notice that there’s a viewing window at one end. Looking through this is like looking through a huge kaleidoscope, showing multiple reflections of whatever is seen through the other end – in my case a tree and a view of the Hudson.

According to Wikipedia:

Olafur Eliasson (Icelandic: Ólafur Elíasson; born 1967) is a Danish-Icelandic artist known for sculptures and large-scale installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience. In 1995 he established Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, a laboratory for spatial research. Olafur represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and later that year installed The Weather Project in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London.

Olafur has engaged in a number of projects in public space, including the intervention Green river, carried out in various cities between 1998 and 2001; the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007, London, a temporary pavilion designed with the Norwegian architect Kjetil Thorsen; and The New York City Waterfalls, commissioned by Public Art Fund in 2008. He was a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts from 2009 to 2014 and is an adjunct professor at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in Addis Ababa since 2014.