In late 2020, I was commissioned to produce an art installation in Redwood City’s Art Kiosk right on the main square of its downtown. It will be on exhibit from April 17-May 30, 2021.
The kiosk is a beautiful ~14’x14’ building with windows on all sides, so visitors and passers-by can see the art 24/7 from all directions.
I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to create a unique public art installation for my city, and thank Lance Fung and Fung Collaboratives for selecting my project and subsequently working with me as curator. Additional thanks go to Redwood City and the Redwood City Improvement Association (RCIA) for their support.
Here are a couple of pictures from between exhibitions that better show the interior - it really is see through - and at night, showing how visible the interior can be when lit.
My planned installation, titled “Close to Home,” is a narrative on the breadth of man’s relationship with fire. The intimate flames of our campfires and fireplaces embody the very ideas of home, comfort, and romance, and we rely on combustion to fuel our heating, cooking, transportation and industrial production. Yet, the immense power of uncontrolled wildfires too close to home is devastating, and we aren’t innocent in the build-up of this threat through our contributions to climate change, where we choose to live, and land use and management. Fire, a key element that enabled the rise of civilization, threatens to also be our undoing.
To embody these ideas, I’m utilizing photographs of flames from family campfires with my sisters “at the lake” (as they say in Minnesota) from the last several years. I was moved to revisit these photographs by the 2020 wildfire season in the Bay Area, the peril of which contrasted so greatly with my fond memories of these family campfires. I printed a few in black-and-white and folded and curved each one into unique shaped objects. I knew very quickly that I’d finally realized the right form for these - the gestures created by shaping them in 3D so beautifully added to that already in the images.
It quickly became clear that as much as I loved each piece, hanging them in multiples was a good thing. In grouping them together I can further push the impression of movement, wildness and ascension, all integral to the nature of flames. I began prototyping groupings of just 2-3 pieces to as many as this ~30 piece version in the 10' corner of my studio.
The potential to put this into a space like Redwood City’s Art Kiosk was obvious, and over a couple of weeks I drafted a proposal to submit to Fung Collaboratives for the 2021 Art Kiosk schedule. I was honored to receive word I’d been selected.
Visually, the essence of my plan is this, shown in the kiosk environment with 2 walls cutaway:
The main component is a ~12' high ascending arrangement of many of my shaped photographs of flames on an asymmetric, 3-sided central scaffold. In the above sketch, each rectangle on the scaffold is a shaped photograph. On the front of each shaped photograph is the image itself, and I’ll be marking the backs in various ways using coals collected from burned trees from our local wildfires. This central structure will be lit to create shadows and possibly movement. There may also be additional supporting elements to the installation.
In the time since the commission I’ve been defining materials, finalizing designs, testing lighting, creating scale models, and more. Feel free to comment below on the project.
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Redwood City Art Kiosk information
Fung Collaboratives Art Kiosk information