Big Bronze Book - The Public Casting of Cities collaborative was initiated in 1999 with a grant from the University at Buffalo. The purpose of this collaborative was to explore new forms of public art, and in particular, how public art contributes to the construction of civic identity. From the onset, this multidisciplinary collaborative took the approach of bringing together issues and methods found in Art, Architecture, History, and Planning.
Given that the two-thousand-pound bronze book was conceived in 1999, the collaborative began to see it as homage to the Twentieth Century- a “final book” in a time when sophisticated technologies threaten to eliminate traditional physical books, as we know them.
Big Orbits - Space is constructed by the body in motion. The exterior placement of an interior geometry. 4600 shipping palettes were stacked in a gallery space, adjoining a courtyard of identical shape. Using elliptical geometry an ovoid volume was carved from the palette stack. Simultaneously, the removed pieces were reassembled in the courtyard as an ovoid solid.
The work functions as a scale, balancing positive and negative, apogee and center.
A lever of space.
Push/Pull - In an eighty-year old concrete building, one hundred gallons of latex were painstakenly, obsessively painted onto a twenty-six-hundred square-foot concrete floor. In one section, inflation valves cut from bicycle inner tubes, were layered into the coats. In another section, a two-by-four inch steel beam, lift hooks attached, was immured in the seventeen coats of latex. When dry, the valves were inflated and the beam was ratcheted toward the ceiling.
Big Orbits (interior) - View from above of the interior half of Big Orbits
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