Step(pe)

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Title: Step(pe)
Photo Credit: Arseny Sergeyev
Lead Artist(s):

Contributing Artist(s):

Description:

Although this is a very small project it embodies larger ideas; open work, absence and presence, time and change, and it was done in an amazingly short time with scant funding. I found the mise-en-scene at the old water tower in Yekaterinburg funky, dramatic and moving. Before I arrived I had read about chastushki, the local four line, two stanza folk songs. I met with students to show how I work with concrete and why my work invites the suspension of immediate intelligibility at the boundaries of meaning, mine marks that open up to the unexpected and provide objects with which to think. A half dozen indefatigable students and our intrepid translator wrote the chastushki with me on the first night, and went to assemble the materials we needed. Working at the concrete factory we produced and installed this new threshold to the old water tower within 5 days. My favorite image is that of the opening ceremony that took place just five days after I arrived in Yekaterinburg, the chalk in vibrant blue paired with the seemingly timeless quality of the cast letterform. The lost letters imply the timeworn façade selectively effaced by history; a seemingly incidental breakdown of type whose meaning was nevertheless clear to the initiated. Most of all, this work is an invitation to enter the process of signification at the threshold of meaning and the threshold of the tower.

PROJECT LOCATION

Municipal Building/Site
old water tower, Siberia, Russia
Yekaterinburg,
Russia

click the map to enlarge
PROJECT TEAM

CEC ArtsLink
ArtinPro Pervy Betonny - Pervouralsky Zavod
unknown
PROJECT DETAILS

Permanent
$8,600
Public
Sculpture, Memorial
Concrete/Masonry, Metal
sculpture
2006
2007