 Can you all hear me? Yeah, all right. So we're going to go ahead and get started. My name is Caitlin Cameron. I'm the urban designer for the city of Portland, and I'm the project manager for the Congress Square redesign project. We're all here because public art was a high priority in our visioning process when we were thinking about what Congress Square wants to become. And so we have this very rare and unique opportunity to design the public art and the space together at the same time collaboratively. So for those of you who attended the May 4th forum with the design teams, this will be the same format. But with the artists this time, the finalists we have for the public art commission. So first, we will hear from the four artists. So we'll give a 20-minute presentation each. And then we'll have some time for question and answer. And we also have these survey cards that were at the table up front. We'd very much like to hear from you. If you don't want to fill it out tonight, there's a link at the bottom that you can fill out online. You're also free to take a few of these and pass them out to folks. Because we have CTN in the back of the room filming for SNA, and we're going to post a link to the film of this evening for people to access as well. To give you a sense of the next steps of this process, once the artist is selected for the project, the design team and the artist will begin the concept designs for Congress Swear. So be on the lookout for announcements of public events and meetings to do with developing those concepts, probably beginning in the fall and through the spring. With that, I'm going to introduce Pandora Kase, who is one of the chairs of the Congress Swear Art Selection Committee. Sorry, it's a lot of titles there. This is a subcommittee of the Public Art Committee tasked with selecting artists for this project. So I'll hand it over to Pandora. Good evening. Good evening. It's wonderful to see you all. Caitlin said a few things. But I'm going to, my name is Pandora Kase. I co-chair the Congress Swear Redesign Artist Selection Panel along with my colleague, Allison Hilderth. The Selection Panel is a subcommittee convened in 2014 by the Portland Public Art Committee to bring a signature work of art to Congress Square. On behalf of the Portland Public Arts Committee and the Artist Selection Panel, it is our great pleasure to introduce the finalists for the Congress Square Art Commission, Ned Khan, Sarah Z, Patrick Merrold, and Matthew Witchie. We would like to acknowledge and thank the members of the Artist Selection Panel for their many volunteer hours and valuable insights in order to get us to this exciting stage in the process. They are Anne Buckwalter, Artist, Membership, and Communications Manager at Space Gallery, Ian Jacob, designer, board member and representative of the Friends of Congress Square Park, Lynn Lizberger, artist and chair of the Portland Public Art Committee, and Jessica May, chief curator at the Portland Museum of Art, Tony Mensch, landscape architect and member of the Portland Public Art Committee, Scott Simons, architect and founding member of the Portland Society of Architects, Jessica Tomlinson, director of artists at work at the Main College of Art, Frank Turk, artist and board member of the Friends of Congress Square Park, and Bruce Wenestrom, former general manager of the Western Hotel. I would also like to thank our tireless leader, Caitlin Cameron, urban designer from Portland Planning and Urban Development Department, who serves as the city liaison for the Portland Public Art Committee and as project manager for the Congress Square Redesign and Public Art Commission. Our goal was not to purchase a work of art that would be placed in the redesigned square. We chose to seize the rare opportunity of having artist and landscape designer work as equal partners from the beginning of the redesigned process. These four talented artists here tonight demonstrate through their art and process the ability to work collaboratively with designers and community. And with that, I'd like to introduce our first artist, Ned Khan. I'm gonna show you like a half dozen videos of various completed projects. And I went through and kind of picked ones that seemed like maybe there were some parallels to the project here. And so the first one, if I can get it to work, is this is a park in downtown Pittsburgh that was an incredibly bleak, brutal urban space. It was built back in the 70s and it had just turned into a ruin and no one ever went in this place. And the city and the Pittsburgh Children's Museum raised a bunch of money to make it into, to kind of redo the whole thing. And they hired me and I hired a landscape architect, a friend of mine named Andrea Cochran. And Andrea and I collaborated on the whole design of the park. And the original park was like this concrete pit going down to a water feature that had failed decades ago. And so we filled it all in and we made the whole park into kind of a very accessible, a lot of trees, a lot of plants. And then I focused on kind of creating this kind of fog mist sort of water feature in the center of it. And it's basically a forest of these thin stainless steel poles and there's little fog sprayers embedded into these poles. And the poles create this grid that's kind of like a cube, that kind of like a suggestion of architecture. But it's totally permeable, you can walk through it. And the fog nozzles are placed so that they create kind of a sphere of cloud inside this cube of these poles. And so the whole piece was intended as this thing that you would enter and it creates a very different kind of micro climate when you go in there on a hot Pittsburgh day, the fog cools, but drops the temperature like 15 degrees in the space. And depending on the wind, sometimes it forms this perfect sphere, sometimes the wind blows it, sometimes it fills the whole park with kind of a low hanging fog. And so a lot of my work is kind of sort of about nature, even though this is like a totally kind of manmade thing, it kind of the actual artwork itself is kind of this cloud that responds to the wind and to the light and to whatever the atmosphere of the earth in that particular place is doing. This is a plaza at the Denver Airport. Both Patrick and I worked on kind of parallel pieces at the airport. The existing terminal, they built a big new kind of hotel convention center complex and then this was a big public space in between. And they actually ran into problems with a fire marshal. The space was too big and the fire marshal said, you got to make half this plaza unoccupiable space. And so I was the plan B. And so until one of their plans before they got to me was to have a green roof. And but when they got into it, like the weight of the soil and the fact that in the Denver climate, you know, your green roof is a brown roof for half the year. And so I proposed this idea of this huge field that would be these counterweighted aluminum and plastic elements that would move in the wind and basically suggest grasses moving in the wind. But, you know, a field of grasses that you don't have to water or fertilize or, you know, worry about them turning brown. So, and like a lot of my work, it starts off as some maybe slightly poetic idea, but then it quickly turns into a manufacturing problem. Like, how do you, there are 18,500 of these elements that took us about 10 months to fabricate all the pieces and filled a couple of huge trucks of all the pieces that drove it across from my studio in Northern California to Denver, and then like a month in the hot sun. I'm tripping over these rocks here, assembling it all with my crew, hating me more and more with each passing hour. And so there's a hotel right next to it. And so from all the windows of the hotel on this side of the hotel, you look down on this field and some of the most beautiful views are, you know, from the upper floors of this huge hotel. And sort of paradoxically, the farther away you get from the artwork, the more detailed it looks. It's like the individual moving pixels start to dissolve into a more kind of aqueous, liquid-like rendering of whatever the air currents are doing. And it's a super windy place in Denver. And the light is always changing and the wind is always changing. And so you also see it from inside the terminal. And you can walk through the whole array. There's a large kind of pedestrian passageway that's actually one of the main connections between the new hotel convention center and the existing terminal. So again, you know, I'm intrigued with the idea that it's a completely unnatural system. You know, it's a bunch of pieces of metal and plastic and stainless steel. And but in its movement and its behavior, it becomes like a register for what the atmosphere is doing. So it becomes something that's kind of in sort of the gray area between a man-made thing and a nature-made thing. It's somewhere in between. It has, it sort of blurs that boundary between man-made and nature-made. And so it's really nature. It's really the wind that sculpts it. You know, I kind of built the, I conceived and my crew built the structure. But the structure is almost like a musical instrument that gets played by someone else. In this case, the atmosphere. So the light comes through it and the shadows, you know, bounce off of the rocks below. And the individual moving pieces, light bounces a lot along onto another. And this is from up in the far reaches of the hotel. And yeah, the farther back you get, you really start seeing what like whole gusts of wind look like. And the wind is, you know, every day different, every minute different. And so it's something that's intrigued me as an artwork that's very inherently linked to what's exactly happening in this very moment. And this thing that becomes a very subtle rendering detector of whatever the atmosphere is doing. This project was a collaboration with Gensler, the architectural firm that did the new hotel convention center complex and designed the plaza. And yeah, so here it is kind of farther back. And again, you can kind of see the patterns kind of changing and being revealed at different distances. Here's another, this was another bleak urban plaza in Perth, Australia, on the west coast of Australia. And this is very kind of harsh stone and concrete plaza. And they wanted an artwork to kind of soften it a little bit. And so I designed and built this array of, they were inspired by feathers. There's a bay right on the other side of this plaza that's called Swan Bay. And I just got intrigued with the idea of kind of feathers. And so these columns are surrounded by an array of four of these arrays of their very thin stainless steel kind of little fingers that are attached. But they're flexible enough that they move in the wind. And each one of these little kind of spines is reacting individually to the wind. But they somehow develop coordinated movements. They somehow kind of affect the way the wind hits each one, kind of deflects and activates the ones next to them. And the shadows and the light that come through them are constantly changing. And it's a super windy place. And when I started the project, everyone told me, no one uses this plaza because it's really windy. And so part of the intent was to kind of shift people's attitude about the wind. So instead of it just being viewed as this negative thing to celebrate it, to make it interesting and to reveal it. And this is another collaboration on a landscape. This is with a landscape architecture firm called Walker Macy based in Portland, Oregon, the other Portland. And this is a park in downtown Sacramento, California. And it's right along the Sacramento River. And it's a site where there used to be these amazing docks back in the 1800s. It's the whole reason the Sacramento exists. This was as far as you can navigate up the Sacramento River. And these docks are completely been erased. There's just a few little tiny remnants of them. But it's where all the boats loaded all the gold from the gold rush happened. And so my intent was to create an artwork that kind of suggested this totally forgotten past. And so it's a series of stainless steel, perforated stainless steel triangles, each one kind of slightly different size triangle so that the whole form kind of suggests a boat or a vessel of some sort. And so it's just the wind moving these. And you look through these multiple layers of perforated metal. And you see these complex moray patterns. And from a distance, it really looks like water, which was kind of the intent was to create sort of the opposite of a boat. A boat is kind of this thing that the vessel that excludes water so it floats. And this was the idea of kind of a vessel that was made out of water. And there's also mist sprayers in between the layers. And Sacramento is a super hot, dry place in the summer. And so it's set up so when people walk underneath it, they activate a motion sensor that turns on these mist sprayers. And so you get bathed in a nice, cool mist. And here is another big plaza project. This is in Singapore. This was a collaboration with Moshe Softee. It's a huge hotel convention center waterfront complex. And Moshe needed a skylight kind of interrupting this big public plaza to bring light down to the lower levels of this big retail complex. And I talked everyone into making this kind of inverted skylight that would fill up with water. It collects rain. But it's also a recycling system that the steel structure that supports it is pressurized with water. And the water is injected so it rotates. And it forms this huge vortex. The acrylic bowl that supports it all is 70 feet in diameter. It's like bigger than this auditorium. And so the water falls through a huge hole in the center of this into a pool below and falls a couple of stories down. And then the whole pool below functions as kind of a reservoir for the rain. And you also see this thing from a bunch of levels above it. And it's on a cycle, so every 20 minutes it fills. And it takes about 20 minutes to fill. And you get a huge amount of water in there. It's about an Olympic swimming pool full of water in this thing. And then it takes it about 20 minutes for that water to drain out. This is a project recently finished in part of a development called Playa Vista. It's just north of LAX airport. And it was a big blank public plaza that got baked in the LA sun. And so I ended up collaborating with an architect, a firm called Johnson Thane, on this structure. There's essentially a shade structure for this plaza. So the whole thing is about 100 feet tall. We built these giant ellipses of steel that attached to an existing parking structure. And then the kinetic part is a series of curtains that are made out of a plastic chain mail fabric. And it's this woven bunch of 10 million little plastic rings that are all woven together. And they're spaced in such a way that when the wind blows on it, the fabric kind of expands. And it basically, these waves that it creates are very analogous to the waves that wind creates over water. You start off with little ripples, and then they grow in magnitude until you have these large waves passing. And then this is inside the structure. You look out through these multiple layers of this fabric, and you get these complex interference patterns between the layers. And the shadows pass through it and create these patterns on the floors and walls. And there's a cafe seating in chairs underneath it that you look up through this veil. But it creates this weird illusion that it looks like the whole building is rotating. And it's really just the wind. And when we were installing this, we had a number of people come by who saw this thing and were convinced that we had some super high-tech way of making this whole building spin. And they were desperate to see the software that we were running to do this. And they were slightly disappointed when they realized it's an incredibly simple thing. It's really just taking advantage of this beautiful phenomena that nature is providing. But again, not real nature, kind of a murky ground between a man-made thing and natural. But it has the feeling of water. It has the soothing quality of watching waves at the ocean. But again, without all the stuff that goes along with the traditional water feature where you have to sterilize the water and maintain it and clean it. So it has the feeling of a water feature without all the maintenance. And this project, along with a lot of my other projects, was an incredible exercise in getting it approved by the local building department. So it was basically built this 100 foot tall building for this thing. And they had never seen this plastic material. It was a year and a half of going to meetings with the planning and the building department before we finally had approval. We actually, that was a guy, my engineer for the project. It became his weekly job was to show up at LA Building Department and ask for our permit again. And how am I doing for time, Caitlin? Wait a minute. Sorry, I'll just show one more. And this is one of my trustee assistants of many decades, Uva, who is sitting here. I was hoping that I wouldn't point him out. This was a project that Uva created and installed with me in Fort Worth, Texas. And it's in a traffic roundabout. And they're building a whole series of bridges over. They basically redirected the river that runs through downtown Portland. And in reorganizing the river, they had to stitch it back to the urban structure with a series of bridges. And they originally wanted me to work on the bridges. And then there was all kinds of politics with the bridges. And they fired the bridge designer and got a new one. And then at some point, they were like, well, there's this traffic roundabout where all these bridges kind of dump people back onto the land and want to do something there. So the idea was I had done a lot of these facade pieces for parking structures and other shade structures for buildings. So the idea was to take some of those planar pieces that I'd done and wrap it around into a cylinder. And so it seemed like a simple idea. But when we got into it, they have fierce winds in Texas. It's one of the windiest places in the world, actually. And so the engineers basically said, well, you need all kinds of structure to stabilize this thing. So it was a fantastic amount of work for mostly torture for poor Uva here. And then installing it, Uva put all these curved pieces up, put in all the substructure that links them all together, and then stretch these cables. There's basically like an eighth inch diameter, a little bit bigger stainless steel cables spaced every six inches from the top ring to the bottom ring. And then 10,000 of these moving elements clamped to it. And so again, it becomes this register for whatever the atmosphere is doing. And each individual piece moves. But then also the whole thing acts like a fabric and kind of undulates and moves and resonates in the wind. So running out of time. So I guess each artist is going to present, and then there'll be time for questions and answers afterwards. Hi, my name is Sarah Zee. And I'm going to go through three public projects that I've done, and then talk a little bit about this site, that my thoughts on this site in particular, and then show you three pieces of work that are not public. But the ideas, I think, relate to the site. This is a piece I did in New York City. It's on the corner of Central Park. And one of the challenges of this site was just that the amount of cacophony around the site is huge. It's right across from the Park Plaza. There are horses and carriages right to the right here. And this is a major intersection on the corner of Central Park. And so what I decided to do is try and harness the spectacle of the city itself and to actually imitate the caddy corner of the building but to place it in the sidewalk. So there was something that you recognized from the city, but it was an entirely different context. Something I'm interested in is how a work reads at night in an urban space and at day so that you can have a night viewing. Brings people back to the location to experience it in an urban night setting. So this piece was lit from the inside so that when you came up to it at night, you also had this view into an interior. I'm particularly interested in public art creating a kind of intimacy in a public space. So you have this kind of intersection of being in the outside, in the urban realm, but then having a moment of intimacy, a surprising moment of intimacy in a public space. So this is looking down into the interior. This piece goes about 12 feet underground in Manhattan. So when you get right up close to it, you have an entirely different sense of scale from the view of Manhattan, which is often looking up, down into this sort of miniature interior space. This is a piece I did in Washington. I did two versions of this piece. One is yellow and one is blue. And I put in this piece because I'm interested in this idea that a piece can become, feels like it became site-specific in the location. So it feels viral. It feels like it grew there. It feels like if you came there two days later, it might actually look different. That it has a kind of organic quality to its own making on that site. I'm interested in that there being locations where you discover it in surprising ways, where it places where it peters, places where it grows, and has different kind of entries to it. So you can find it in a corner. You can find it in a main space. It can show up in many locations along a kind of path or a choreography over time. So this is the piece at MIT. It's on the dorm. You actually come across it from pretty far away down a street. And from very far away, it just sort of feels like a blue streak across the building. But as you get closer, you start to see what it is. And the actual piece is it's three sections. The idea is that I want to make this kit that actually would bring to a location and assemble it and would become site-specific. So it's three sections of a fire escape. There's a ladder, a stair, and a balcony. And they go together in any combination to climb a building to inhabit a space. So this is one of the floors of the dormitory and the piece climbed up and went actually to the top. And from the upper levels, you could see it on the roof. This is the third piece that did this piece on the High Line in New York. The High Line I think is an incredible artwork in and of itself as a park. And there really was the question of how to make that park even better. And one of the things that I was thinking about was just this amazing experience of speed that the High Line offers in New York because it is a railway in a city where you are constantly making a decision every block, whether to go left or right. It's this railway which is this incredible respite from that decision-making in that it just, you just go straight. It's a promenade. So I wanted the piece in form to actually feel like it's sped in that kind of way you feel at the speed of a Midwestern highway in a way that you don't get usually in Manhattan. And I wanted to thrust you from again the very, very minute out to the skyline of Manhattan. So that's the Empire State Building. I also wanted to think about the incredible nature that actually survives in New York and on the High Line they have an amazing array of butterflies, bees, birds. So each of these habitats, if you will, are designed around the existence of a very specific bird or a very specific butterfly in Manhattan and they became feeding spots for those birds, butterflies and bees. The last thing I think was really important for me about this project was to make a piece that you didn't just drive by or walk by. It wasn't an object that you could separate from the environment, but that it was, you actually went through the piece. You bisected the piece in the promenade so that there was a moment on this promenade where you were surrounded by the work. And you couldn't pass it. You couldn't separate it from the environment. There's this moment where you should have realized you are in the work and that boundary between what a work is and what environment is and what an artwork is gets blurred. So this is the coast of Maine. I've grown up coming to Maine to visit relatives and friends and I have a real love for it. I, in thinking about this location because there was always a stopping point for me to go further into Maine, but a very exciting stopping point. I was thinking about the location and I really felt like it was a place that had potential for many pockets of activity in the square that you want that a trail, that an idea of a narrative of a trail, not just one object that sat in the middle of the park, but several objects, perhaps one with a mother rock that actually held the space, but then you would go through the park and you would find other locations in the series. You would find a kind of discovery and unraveling or a trail, if you will, in the space. This idea, again, this is a preliminary idea, but this idea of a sort of a split rock that then has an imprint that the weight of that rock feels like it made that print on the ground. I am a sculptor, but I'm also a printmaker and I love this idea of the pressure of a block creating a print and that moment of discovery when you lift the actual block. And so this idea, I think, comes directly from that. This is a sculpture I did in a school, a high school, the biggest high school in the Bronx in New York and we use this very beautiful technique of kind of terrazzo technique of cutting into the tile and having the shadow of the sculpture cut into the ground below. So in a place where you actually couldn't have access to touching the sculpture itself that was quite fragile, you actually have this kind of intimate experience of it on the ground in that high school and the reflection on the ground. That's just another picture of a print being pulled and this idea of reflection on the ground. And this idea of sort of an organic kind of architecture, an architecture that, sorry, a sculpture that actually feels as if you discover it in natural space, a kind of mimicking of discovering of locations through a park or through a space. I think to me is very much about mimicking what I think is this incredible experience of nature where you have these moments where the unexpected happens and to try and mimic that in the placement of an artwork is something that I try and do. So this is a piece of mine from Venice. These are not permanent pieces. I did a work in Venice at the American Pavilion and the American Pavilion is a very, when you go to the Venice Biennale, it's at the place everyone goes and I wanted to sort of make it more dispersed, make a trail to pull that location out and fracture it. So I made these rocks. They're actually, they are photographs of rocks that are then printed on Tyvek. So printed on FedEx material. So it's actually extremely resilient. And then I put them throughout Venice. This is where we did our grocery shopping. This is a grocery store in Venice. Comes up every, and there's the rock. And everyone in the neighborhood actually, we asked if they wanted a rock. Everyone said they wanted a rock. They owned the rocks. They took care of the rocks. They were all there in perfect condition after seven months. And so you would see them. This is where we got our newspapers. You would see them throughout the city and you might see them on your way there. And then when you got to the pavilion, you sort of understood that they were part of the pavilion or you might see them after you went to the pavilion and then realized that they were part of the pavilion, but that it left this trail over time and space and in one's memory. That's the pavilion. You can see them all. They're all piled up in the space. This is a piece I did at San Francisco MoMA and it is a five part piece. And it's actually a Jeep Cherokee that was cut into five pieces and then then splayed down the entire atrium. But this idea that you would see from afar, you sort of see it as a streak of red. And when you get up close, you start to understand what it is you recognize it, but in a very different context. And this is the kind of, this is the back, if you can see, this is overhanging the atrium. That's the back hatch open and this looks out over the atrium. But I like this shot of this, also this idea that when you come in, it has this incredible presence in a very large abstract way. And then as you move closer, you have this very, very interior, fragile, more intimate experience of a work. That scale shift, the last piece, non-permanent piece I'll show you is, this sort of, I sort of decided to a piece where that scale shift was really the central idea of the work. So this is called Portable Planetarium. I was really thinking about this moment where we see images of the earth and you have this kind of sense suddenly of how small you are in space and time and often the camera will move away from the earth. And in this case, you go closer and closer to the piece and when you get to the piece at the center, you're nested in it and you're sort of centered inside the work itself within that transition, I think is a kind of shocking intimacy in this work. And this is the last slide I'll show you. This is the permanent piece that I'm working on right now that is actually done and will be opened to the public in the new year or I would say probably March. It's a 14-year project in the making. It's a 96th Street subway station in New York and they've added three stations to that line and for each station, they've asked one artist to do every single entryway and every single waiting dock. So they're very, very immersive experience and I think it will be exciting when the three stations open. Thank you. It's great to be up here with three other amazing artists. My work is primarily based in the inherent features of a site, things that interest me and then I introduce my artistic perspective to kind of sharpen that dynamic exchange between myself and the space but hopefully the public as well. So some of these, the first group of images I'm gonna show you are works that aren't necessarily public but it's approach. This is a piece from 2000 and it's just, it's basically strings suspended inside a grain silo and I was a resident artist on the Antucket Island where I would work with this silo in many different ways but this piece would almost track and collect the sunlight throughout the day. It also breathed like a lung with the air movement and of course the children at school, the adults at the school, they all interacted with it. It was a very tactile piece. It was temporary too. That summer hurricane did eventually come close enough. It was totally destroyed and that was one of the first times or experiences I realized that there was this emotional connection to a work too and it was really impressive to me to see the people that did interact with it be upset. It was tangled and gone but this piece kind of continued to interest me with other cable and string installations in different volumes, architecture, once again capturing the light in the specific ways. It's a way that sometimes I'll understand architecture and the proportions and the volume. Let's see, let's start. And allow the viewer to consider their orientation. Sometimes these are installations to walk through, to pass through, to touch. Sometimes they're too fragile to necessarily touch but they just introduce almost a different dimension to a gallery space or an outdoor space. A lot of times they inform me as I'm making them so the public is almost seeing just shortly after what I see experiencing the same experience. I know there's an outcome that I'm interested in but a lot of times I don't really know where it's gonna lead. It's an example of a piece that as a young artist I'd work, well I still work in the landscape quite a bit but sometimes just making momentary pieces to capture a shadow stitched across a landscape which these disconnect after a couple minutes as the sun passes and I introduced this to the Botanic Gardens in Denver. Also referencing the fences and the barbed wire fences across the west have changed that landscape. But this moment where all the shadows align and bisect the landscape and stitch across it and then a lot of these people passing through may not have noticed it but there were these points every day where I'd connect and then disconnect. I'm interested in those moments, those time-based ideas. And the idea of collecting light. These pieces are some studio works that I'm just continually exploring and obviously I'm not collecting, I'm not holding and containing light but I'm trying to represent that and the urge to do so. And then to somehow take these containers and collide them or intersect them or create intersections really. And with this piece implying these spherical volumes in a very dark material, this graphite, to also interest the viewer to come up closer, look through that intersection and then you realize there's an audible volume surrounding you too as the sound waves behave differently in volume like this. Taking it to a different material, once again going back to something more luminous with glass which then introduced a whole new dynamic of results with these interlacing fissures that started to lead to questions of geometry and temperature is basically what would cause these cracks. And how to resolve that further. All these pieces are these continual experiments and how to capture what's going on with that. This is basically a photograph. So this is a 48 by 48 black and white silver gelatin photograph. The paper directly placed on the glass using a glass like a lens and registering the way light is passing through all that. So I did a series of these past year, these large scale black and white photo prints, photograms, basically removing the camera from the process. But all of these explorations inform the way I approach public art commissions. I try to approach each site specifically and treat it as a new project to inform this approach I've developed in the studio. This is basically a fence. It's a barrier between City Park and Denver Zoo. The original intention was to create this horizontal sense of movement and this composition. But I was also informed by the feathers. I think Ned had a feather piece too and there's something incredible about that micro architecture. And this was an avian propagation center at the Denver Zoo. So there were feathers everywhere and they were informing my, just my impression of the site. So the early drawings and sketches that I would do on site started to kind of reveal this feathery form. Most of my projects I work on sketches and I respond to site this way with charcoal. To create this piece, we salvaged a tremendous amount of basically steel pipe. This commission was during the Chinese Olympics and the steel market was crazy and we had to resolve how we were going to accommodate the scale of this piece. So all this was salvaged steel pipe. Unfortunately, most fabricators won't work with salvaged pipes so me and my crew rolled and welded everything for this one which was a great lesson in making the piece as I go and sticking with, I guess the challenges become opportunities. This is a piece in Denver as well. I titled this in Virga. We have a lot of Virga, the rain, a lot of times does not reach the ground. Virga is basically the rain falling from the cloud but it evaporates before it actually hits the ground. Our Eric climate, well, we see a lot of that. The moisture just passes us by. This was a piece on a train trial in downtown. It's now a pedestrian bridge but the idea was to reflect the sky that's behind you from whatever perspective you're approaching it. Once again, starting with an impression of what I was hoping to create in this sense of Virga suspended in this train trial or trestle, sorry. And then the idea of the pedestrians floating past it the way that Virga will be watching just float past us. You know how these moments where it just completely pops from the landscape as the sky behind you. Whether it's sunset or sunrise. And then certain points in a day just completely disappears as well. And then this is interesting. I feel like this piece relates to your plaza or the square. This piece has started to activate this bridge as a place for events. This is kind of funny, it's a bagpipe performance but a composer in Denver was inspired by the chromatic shifts evident with the piece and that he watched and he composed a piece that the reason they were bagpipers was he composed it in just intonation and we couldn't really get a pipe organ out there so he wanted to maintain this composition he'd come up with. But it has started, the bridges start to create another personality that is part of downtown Denver events and sometimes there'll be bands that play on there now or a lot of weddings. This is a piece I recently finished up in Calgary at the National Music Center that they just finished building. And this is basically a sound installation as well as a sculptural installation composed of a soundboard from pianos that were part of their collection. It's a place in the skybridge that connects two sides of the museum or the center. On one side you have the record of the music that's been made on the other side where it's made. They have all these studios and opportunities to produce music. It's a solar based work so these are the solar panels on top of that skybridge and those directly send current individually to each unit that causes an electromagnetic system to activate a piano wire in each one creating a tone. So you have 16 of these. This is Morton Lawler. He actually tuned them for the first year. And sometimes they'll all play together, maybe one, maybe three, but they're all based off the characteristics of the sky. They'll change octaves sometimes but it's kind of an unpredictable piece that way. You can't really, you don't know what you're gonna hear. Sometimes it's silent. It's all dependent on the angle of the sun and then you have the conditions of the sky. And yeah, the sound boards taken from these pianos are from, they had a flood three years ago in Calgary. Basically there was a foot of water everywhere in Calgary. So part of their collection was just completely destroyed. So I was able to reuse these kind of Steinways and stuff. I couldn't believe I was cutting up these gorgeous pianos but I guess they had enough. This is a piece, I think Ned and I have both been attracted to the wind and the movement of the wind. This is called the Windmill Project. I started this in Iceland about 15, 16 years ago. And the idea was, well, I was living in Iceland in the dark. I had the dark and I had the wind and I wanted that to be my medium. So I created these windmills that would generate a quality of light depending on the velocity or the force of the wind. I would hook these out and throw the landscape each day. At the time there was about 300 of them and since it has grown. But the idea is just translating the evening winds into this living body of light. And there is something interesting about a man-made system translating this and introducing this dynamic. I hope it's dark enough. Yeah, you guys should be able to see this. But it kinda, once again, there's that unpredictable quality and sometimes the wind doesn't blow. And going back to that first piece that basically was destroyed by the wind. There's this response to people who expect to see something to be able to just turn it on and I can't turn this on. I put it in place and it either works or it doesn't. And I think that's interesting to introduce that disappointment sometimes. You know, if we could simply flip it on and it can be like right now. I should just put it on the TV. Yeah, these waves and eddies of light. This was in Vale. I also did it in Burlington, Vermont and of course Iceland. And of course you can walk among these as well. This is the piece I did for the Denver International Lighter Board that's near Ned's piece as well. Basically 236 Beetlekill spruce from the Real Grand National Forest in Colorado. Denver, it's funny. You mentioned the way they approached you about your site. They also approached me. We have this valley. We don't know what to do with it. It's been engineered, but it hasn't been designed. Can you do something? And I spent a lot of time in the site studying it and trying to get familiar with it. It was still very much a construction site when I was coming up with my approach. But it was very clear that the solar exposure and just the vast scale of this valley were gonna be dominant in whatever I do. And I needed to somehow work with that. So I created a piece that casts a shadow array. It's always changing. It's always moving. But it's a very different frame of mind in terms of time and when we travel and how quickly everything moves. And the idea of slowing down for a moment to notice these shadows and then the last effect, shadows are moving throughout the day. I just thought I'd show this. Sometimes people ask, how do you make these things? A very simple idea certainly becomes very complex in execution. But we peeled these logs from the forest for about 18 months and then basically calibrated them all and created the infrastructure to place them. And what was great about this piece there is it really did employ a lot of local craftsmen and enthusiasts, artists in Colorado, maybe a team of 20 helped install it. And to involve that many people in something on this scale, I think it did inform the piece and how it came together and how it engaged the community. And it was something I'm very proud of having, it being my home, my home and my home airport and somewhere where I and a lot of friends travel on a regular basis. You have the variations throughout the year in terms of seasons and of course, daily shifts. And then there's a nighttime presence as well. I created a lighting program or a lighting effect that I wanted it to embrace and greet the twilight and the way the quality of light at twilight starts to vibrate with the sky. And then as the sky grows darker and darker, it takes on its own life, its own personality and almost mimics tides or a shift that comes in throughout the night. Of course, this is time lapse, so it moves much slower than what you're gonna see. So the idea is that if you're staying in the hotel or having dinner on the plaza or taking the time to sit and enjoy, you'll start to see these shifts and transitions in lighting to activate the valley as well as the piece itself and hopefully engage in a different sense of time. And I think that is the final slide or video. Thank you. I am actually a super main fan. I've been coming here for 25 years, much like Sarah. So this project is a special sort of place in my heart and I really wish you the very best with it because I always thought that sort of main hasn't quite yet had the art it deserves but it's clearly gonna get it. So this is a little bit of my, yes, you want me to do this. I'm actually began as a gallery artist. So my transition into public art took place through a show at Mass MoCo where I started working on a very large scale with these kind of transparent forms and large scale sculptures, much like every artist that kind of moves into public sculpture, you suddenly find yourself infatuated with shadow and light and change and you're like, my goodness, it's amazing what happens to things when they become life size. So this sculpture was there and it gradually led me into some private projects where I moved from the gallery to the outdoors. But my real transition was a kind of birth of fire where I got a project with the GSA in Washington DC which organized these national things. They gave me a project in Eugene, Oregon in a courthouse with a bunch of judges who kind of didn't want the art there. And it was my first real introduction to the public art process. Like how, not only, and this is something I want to sort of introduce early because I'll come back to it a few times, not only how difficult it is but also how important it is because the whole purpose of art in the public sphere is that it engages the public, not just a small subset of the public who happens to like art already but you're dealing with people who have to learn to appreciate art over time. And so this introduction to the time element and the idea of a narrative and a shared story which is very central to my original practice became very important. I'm gonna show you four projects where I think that's expressed in different ways. This particular one, these little heads were made by local school children and the way we got around this big discussion about these kind of very conservative judges was this, I developed this kind of map of the Willamette river system and I mapped the history of justice onto it. And this became a way for us to talk about, so these are some other installations about this idea of participation. And another thing I'm gonna show you is over the years I've become very much involved with performing arts which is really always about telling a story. So these two things kind of came together as I find the building blocks in any given situation and build the story out of that. My work looks very complex but every time it's the same thing going on. It's find the through line, find the drawing, draw the map and build the story. So this project is a version of that. I was commissioned by a Viennese foundation to do a project that turned out to be a map of the universe, the biggest story of all. So I worked with some physicists and they also wanted it to be durable, transportable, modular, fractal, able to survive in all climates inside and out, be shown anywhere in the world and be legible to any culture in the world. It was a great, you know, you guys are, you got nothing in terms of complexity. It's an easy project. So this is it at the Venice Architecture Biennial. We did a sort of test and the key to this project is that as it shows in this, this is the map. Every little block is a fractal part of the system and can support and fit with any other block. Much as Sarah was sort of describing this idea of an opportunistic installation, I think this is a common theme for public art practices. You have to be able to roll with the punches. So this piece can be assembled indoors or you can make it much, much bigger and assemble it outdoors. And every single one of the components, you know, they range from this size to the size of half this room, supports all the other ones in any orientation. And then it has to work at night as this kind of notion of like, what do we do with public space at night? And then it has to also be able to operate. That was in Sevilla. This is in Istanbul in the busiest square in Istanbul. It's got traffic, it's got ferries. It's also the second piece of public art to be shown in Istanbul. So the audience had very complex reactions to it. They were like, because it plays music all the time. I'll show you a little bit of that in a second. So when they liked the music, they would sort of make kind of like little kind of, like they kind of thought it was a lie, if I think. And we're talking about people really from almost a medieval agrarian society coming in with their vegetables. They would sort of beckon to it to make more music. And when they didn't like it, which was quite a bit because it had some, it's 40 different compositions by different musicians, they would throw little stones at it, like hoping that it would stop, which I felt was a great kind of model of interactivity in public. The piece is super strong. You can climb to the top of it. We had like 50 people standing on it. And it became sort of, in Vienna, it became very different. It's a party space, you know, it's a kind of thing. And it's also a environment for musicians to perform and the whole thing is wired for sound. So every little one of the smallest bricks has a speaker inside. And I don't think we have sound here. But you can see, so it evolves through the day. Here we go. From that kind of thing. So this is one of the commissioned pieces for it. This is a band called Sigarros. And they would perform it. And this is one of the ones where people were like, yes, give us more. Obviously it had to be all kinds of weather conditions. And then some of the other pieces are much more aggressive. This is Lira Ronaldo from Sonic Youth. So this was kind of more to the Let's Throw Stones at it. And then it kind of got worse from there. But the idea was to create something that was sort of both a performance space and a sculpture. And that kind of got inverted in a number of projects after that, where I kind of tried to turn performances back into sculptures. So I worked with a lot of musicians and composers in different environments. And very much part of each project is also where is the audience? And we're used to this kind of situation. But what happens when you break that and you allow people to just participate in it as if they were moving around the sculptures, if they're in a social space with the performance work? So breaking the proscenium, but not only that, but creating an environment where the entire interior of a space becomes a kind of a sculpture itself that everyone is in a sense a performer. And once you make that decision, then you can start to make all kinds of beautiful things happen in every part of the space, which is a kind of central thing. And then you can also begin to reconsider the role of the outside as a potential site where everyone is essentially performers participating. Another project I thought was particularly relevant here is a garden that I've just almost completed. Talk about long-term projects. This is a 10-year began under the Bush administration. But it's a tough site. I thought this was interesting too for you guys. It's a roof over a vivarium, six inches of depth of soil over most of it, two over the rest. They were like, they wanted just a sculpture. And I was like, I'd like to do a garden. They're like, well, you've never done a garden. I was like, no, but can I? And they're like, well, you can't hear because this place sucks. And we don't know what to do with it. So really there was kind of no loss. So we made this, I built a strategy with the horticulturalists and the landscape designers. They were also like, we have no maintenance budget for your art garden. So it has to be totally self-sufficient, requiring at most two maintenance visits a year. So this is a thing called Grimes Triangle, which I love because it's also a kind of map of us. It's like there's three kinds of creatures in the world. There's competitors, stress tolerance, and ruderals, which are the ones that sort of hide and come back again, which is sort of like me, an artist. So we built a vocabulary of plants that each one was one of these strings. So whenever one dies off, another one will move in. That's a sort of rule of Grimes Triangle. And then we made this map, which is also a taxonomical history that became the roof. And it's a history of the evolution of plants, from the very oldest plants at the deepest end of the roof to the newest plants at the shallowest end, because they're the ones, the stress tolerators that finally moved out like the Arctic or Colorado and live on that little rock on the roof in Venice just holding on. So this is one of the earliest trees, the monkey puzzle tree. So these are just pictures of it. Now it's about two years old. It's just really starting to settle in. But amazingly enough, we planned it out so carefully that we haven't had to add or take away any species. There's just a few of the inevitable horseweed and crabgrass that gets in everywhere. But it really actually has done, I was kind of amazed at the ability of carefully planned organic life to sort of be choreographed and become a performer in this kind of drama of this space. And people love it, it's full of different food groups. So the things that we're going to fill in now with these various kind of characters. And the last piece I'm going to talk about, and then I want to talk a little bit about your site, is a project I did a couple of years ago at the ICA Boston. They asked me to address the museum as a whole and also the entire city around it. The ICA is getting a bit old, it's 10 years old. It was a building of the future. Now it's like in that kind of difficult phase. You know, it's like a kid who's turning from a kid to a teenager, and it's not quite as fresh as it used to be. So they wanted to reinvent it. And a part of the premise of my practice is that there's always a story and there's always a map of how people behave. So the one in the top is the philosopher's diagram. That's the storyteller's diagram. This is what people in corporate planning use. And this is what architects use. It's keys that's fourfold for choralism. There's always a map, there's always a drawing you can make. So we applied those systems to the ICA. This funny building which has this kind of big cantilever. It all seemed super cool at the time. Now it's too small and yet also large. So I also started to throw in the whole idea of New England as this kind of shining city on the hill. What do we do about the reinvention of America? I'm a recent immigrant here. I feel very passionately about what America is, what it can, has sort of still yet become. But the story is very much not written. So this was about, so this is on the Boston Greenway. It's an 80-foot by 80-foot painting on the wall that became a kind of reference to the interior of the building. This was in a local chapel, the Los Romans Chapel. We used that as a way to reach out to very different community of people who just regular churchgoers who hadn't maybe even gone to the ICA even though it's four or five blocks away. We did performances in the space and engaged in a very complicated dialogue with the priest, it's a Siemens church. Of course you have to tread very carefully. A lot of my storytelling is about this kind of aspirational state. And priests are quite rightly proprietary about aspirational states. It's kind of their stock in trade. So you have to have a very rich, but again, this is going back to the idea like public space is for everybody. We're all in this together. And if we're not all in it together then we're not talking about public space. I'm very interested in developing those conversations over time. That's why I've worked with so many different kinds of collaborators. Inside the building, that drawing from the street became echoed on the wall up there, the glass. And this became a space for the public to, that's a sound sculpture. So the kids as they run up and down, they generate a sound sculpture. There's a poetry reading, did musical performances. So we moved from the city into the art space and back into the city without creating a division between the two things. There would be kind of these informal kind of performance events where people were now sometimes in costume, sometimes out of it. The audience were invited up on stage. Tower readings, very classical performances. Kids, oh kind of big feature of my practice in general that's working with these performances is you've got to be able to hang up an electric guitar. And it's got to look good. It can't look like you've imported all this stuff and it's spoiling the art space. You've got to create a kind of participatory relationship. And in terms of your space, so here's a few thoughts just to leave you all with that I thought was amazing about the space being here. We've come through my wife a couple of times on our way up and on our way back. It's actually, it's working, it's pretty great. Like it's a great space. It's got a great aspect. It's got a great, a lot of properties. We were asked, I don't know if this is part of the Q and A but we were asked and there was a very formal letter saying you must address this question of what are the challenges. It's a great space but there's a lot of challenges, right? And I'm sure you all know that. It's hard to take care of parks. You have to get people to buy in. Whatever you put there, they have to love it or they'll hate it, you know? That's kind of how it goes. So we've got to kind of build a consensus around that. But more importantly than that, I think the opportunity here, and I hope you'll consider it whichever of the artists you choose is there's an opportunity to do something a little bit more exciting and interesting. Something that I love about the Northern cities, especially Maine. It doesn't have to be another bland corporate plaza, you know, of the kind where you hire Nets. It's like, please save us with something interesting because we've made this horrible mistake. From the roots up, it seems like you're considering an organic investigation of form that's fully integrated which I think is fantastic. And that really is what I think all of us are very inspired by is the opportunity here to make something that's more than just a response to a blankness, it's something that participates in the life of the city at every level. It's legible at every level. It creates complex social spaces that allows multiple generations of people, not just one or two generations, but allows multiple generations of people to sort of, well, use the corny city motto, kind of rise up. And these are a few spaces that I thought in the same sort of spirit that Sarah was talking about, our interesting versions of that. I also had a picture of a rock that I'd done with a drawing on it, but yours was, you know, once you spend more time on it. So, mine was just the kind of rock with a drawing on it in front of the museum. But I did put these, so these are, this is the Irish Hunger Memorial in New York that's in Noguchi Park. These are all sort of ways in which I think there's this kind of potential for the space, especially this notion of it being a theater that's, think the world has changed since the 1980s when those kind of desolate plazas, which were places of fear, has gone. And we are now in a realm where we appreciate the realm of the public spaces, a place where we can all feel dignified, where we can feel like we're participants in the life of a city. And, you know, there's obviously the winter thing here, a little bit, but sometimes no snow, right? So it's very tough to create. I think that's one of the interesting challenges of it. And then there's also the possibility, from my perspective, you can obviously see I like very iconic sort of dramatic environments. I think that's a property that public space is permitted. It doesn't have to be afraid of drama. You look at these, that's on Monhegan. These, you know, there's another boat and that's in Rome and it looks pretty good. Like you can actually do, we can take risks with public space. And that's what, so to leave you with this sort of image, I think there's this possibility for the full integration of landscape into public life, which creates a kind of sense that we're all living in this together. Thank you. So I'm gonna ask the four artists to please come up to the stage for the question and answer. Everyone was so efficient with time, so we're right on schedule. We will have Lynn with a mic floating in the audience. So if you have a question, please signal to her and she'll come over with the microphone. You can direct your question to one artist in particular or all the artists. We have about a half an hour left, so plenty of time for questions. Can we get the lights up? So I'm actually gonna start with a question of my own, which some of you addressed a little bit, but if you could just reiterate for us what excites you about our project in Congress Square. I'll start. I was initially pretty excited, one because it is Maine, and I used to visit Maine as well when I was in college in it. There's something about people that go through what you guys go through in the winter to then be rewarded a day like today, but it does affect the community and how you behave, and that was something that really attracted me as well as the fact that this is an intersection of those people. I mean, just, we saw it even while we were meeting today, but the variety of people in the public square, it's really impressive already who's using it, and that's something that I would want to embrace and maintain. I think right now it attracts pretty much everyone all walks of life, and that's great to see and to see, whereas a lot of times it's either one or the other. I'll let you guys. I feel like we're each of us. Yeah? I feel like each of us is like, no, I love Maine more. No, I love Maine. I think we wouldn't be here if we all really, because you get invited to locations and you have an attraction to that location. So that I think we're all here for that. I think Matthew brought us something that is really nice about this site, that probably we're all attracted to doing public art, which is that it has the potential to be very live, very active and in multiple ways that you could, the artwork could really be integrated in experience and in multiple kinds of experience throughout the park. And as we all talked about it, as a public artist you often get asked to basically solve the space between the parking lot and the airport, because they need a distance for protection, for actual protection. That's one very common public art problem now is that it involves an aspect that you, airports need to drop off to have a certain distance and then they have a dead space. But to have a space that is really a lived in live space, I think it's enough potential here in Maine and in an incredible city is rare and really exciting. I also think, I mean, just personally, I think Portland's been one of those cities for years, we've come here and thought, well, you know, this place is on its way. It's totally on its way. And you said it come back a few years later. It's like, it's on its way. It's totally on its way now, a few years later. It's gotta be on its way now, hasn't it? Which is true of a lot of the cities from the sort of, you know, the Amtrak corridor even like Baltimore, I mean, Camden, New Jersey. It's like a lot of the cities, they're struggled and they struggle with an industrial infrastructure that's collapsing and a way of life that's changing and people that have really had to adjust their, one kind of model of living to another kind of model of living and now another one is being thrust upon them. And I think the opportunity for me is certainly that it's sort of national, not just here but it's specific here. It's the kind of leapfrog past the kind of Bloomberg era improvements of New York which we're very much about, you know, let's make it safe, let's make it nice, let's make it plain, let's make it simple for a kind of anonymized citizen. I don't see Portland as that kind of city where you're just, want to create an anonymous public plaza with something in it. I think it's a place, I think all the artists are good choices for that. It's a city with a really very strong and vibrant history and identity and that kind of is super exciting because that's how I've always felt about it. Thank you. We're just all that water and go over there. Great, thank you. Questions from the audience? And please don't forget to fill out your survey. We are interested in your thoughts. The online survey will be up through Friday if you would prefer to respond online. Hi, my question is specifically at this point for Ned Khan. Most of the things that you showed, things were moving and I was wondering what kind of noise those various things make? A variety, make too much noise with my microphone. Some of them are totally silent. Some of them are projects for hospitals or hotels where they were like, this thing can't annoy anyone and so we went through a lot of trouble to make them totally silent. And some have been projects that actually, the sound was an important part of it. The first video I showed, the project in Pittsburgh with the kind of big sphere of clouds makes a beautiful hissing sound. And the hissing sound, you hear the hissing sound, you also hear drips of water coming in. It kind of drowns out the city noise. It kind of gives you something naturalish to listen to instead of the cars going by. So it has the property to kind of create like an acoustic oasis in addition to a visual one. That one's completely silent. And some of the other ones, we did a skin for the Pittsburgh Children's Museum and they actually asked us to make something noisy to kind of, you know, because it's museum full of a bunch of screaming kids. So they wanted sound in that case. Okay, all right, thank you. I'm interested in what your first experience, what you imagine your first experience with the landscape architect will be with this site. When you get together and you're looking at it and all the ideas are running rampant. I, from past projects that I know it'll be, these are the issues that kind of, we'll go through all the challenges. Probably that they are gonna have to be overcome in the limitations and then how can you turn those into opportunities or where can you go from that? But typically that's the way working with an architect or a landscape architect or a design team is, oh, we don't have enough money. We don't have enough space. These are our set of limitations. And now how do we get creative with this and do what we do best? But, you guys? I think, I think I try and start with what's the vision of that particular firm? What do they think they do best and then where do we meet and where does that conversation, where do our strengths overlap and where does that conversation lead us? Start very abstractly with goals and what we do, what we particularly, what our language is and what we do well. Yeah, I think one of the advantages, I don't know how if you've been following the process, but the museum and the Friends of Congress swear an enormous amount of pre-visioning and studies in public. So there's a huge amount of data to be said that's already kind of on the table. And it sort of defines our presence here as a public artist is one of the things people want it or we wouldn't even be here probably. They'd say we want ice cream trucks and a dog run and no art. Different meeting, different part of the town, right? So happily there's this kind of like, but then there's also kind of question of like can you articulate something that's unexpected from the site? Like what haven't you thought, what hasn't everybody thought of yet? Like go through that kind of brainstorming and then place it right next to the budget, which would be the other. And so they go okay, can we, where can we go from here? But there's kind of, there's a will as a way. And that's the kind of spirit that it seems like you have to get into with these projects. Any of you feel that your own very private vision is more encompassing than these sort of general visions that you seem to put out this going to almost be a solid, a calming effect for everybody. So I wanna know if any of you feel like you're a ticket maker here, as opposed to taking it somewhere as opposed to making a general statement in his comfort? I'm not sure I understood the question. When you said ticket maker, is that what you said? Yeah. People will come to actually see the work rather than just solve problems. That's a question. Did you have any? If you're stretching this. That we're stretching you with the work that we're putting. I mean, for me that would be the only reason to do it. I mean, I think for me the role of a visual artist is to create a situation that is transformative in that moment that you carry with you way beyond this location that's magnetic, that brings you to the location that changes on the first visit to the 20th visit. And that is challenging. And I think there's a landscape architect and then there's an artist and I think that collaboration solves problems. But I think in a lot of ways, with this site, the landscape artist can actually solve most of the problems. And for me and the project, the artist for me personally, I want to create a moment that is quite profound. And that's a high goal, but for me that's why I do what I do. I think that public art does tend to attract the other approach that maybe you're referring to in terms of something that's safe and something that's maybe comfortable or is going to be received by the masses. And I think we're all up here because we take risks. We do stretch. Yeah, I don't think we would have been invited here if we weren't the artists that are going to push it. From the perspectives we have, I know I certainly take a lot of risks, but I try to make them calculated, but a lot of them fail in my studio before I get to the pub. To pull the lens a little further back, I started as an artist and now I'm a landscape architect. And so I'm conflicted with myself on many projects. But I love the work presented. I would love to experience it, not all at the same time, but very interesting and stimulating. And a lot of you dealt with cycles, cycles of light, cycles of seasons, modeled after natural cycles, but there's a larger looming cycle and it's cultural and it involves taste and perception and everything. And since there's no cool insurance available, how do you design for something that's timeless that won't be like a Richard Sarah ripped up in 12 years and sent to the scrap yard or something, but it's something that will really evolve with the city and its growing community, which involves in itself? Well, I think part of it is having a really informed public participate in the process. A lot of this kind of the approach for the 1970s, like a lot of urban plazas and a lot of building and a lot of frankly architecture at every level from that scheme was here's what you get like lump it or leave it, which is also sort of Richard Sarah's personal approach to life. He's a lovely guy, but it's like my way or the highway. And I think that our, the cultural context has changed and there's a far more, and it's not that it, I mean, the risk is that filters out difference and ambition, but the advantage of that is it allows an opportunity to articulate at a time when our culture really is changing very radically. Some of the most ambitious opportunities that our culture can have for complexity and ambition in public life. So I guess the answer is sort of in two parts. It's like one, aim as high as you possibly can and two, embrace the process as something that can help that, like that rather than something that's inevitably going to hinder it, but be very cautious. And like you guys, it's sort of a process that needs to be kind of iterated multiple times so that voices are heard like I had with the judges in Eugene, but by the end of that project, they were the biggest fans. They, one of them came up to tears in his eyes and was like, this is just the greatest thing that ever happened here. But at the beginning of it, he was like, this money should be spent on the war in Iraq. So, you know, like, there's a cultural cycle, but we're all in it and all you can do is like, do your very best to make it as ambitious and sort of hate had, you know, significant as you can possibly imagine it can be for that time and hope that you get it right. I mean, I also think it's important that the public attached to art does not divorce it from a critical process and critical thinking. And therefore, public art is not made, I don't think, to please or to be a salve or to be decorative. You look at something like the Picasso sculpture in Philadelphia, it was, you know, criticized by every single newspaper in Philadelphia. It's a national treasure. You know, so you have to have some, I think, trust with an artwork that if it's going to be timeless, it's something that even you learn over time and that, you know, it's important that people are critical of it. But it isn't, I mean, Sarah is a very specific example because it was so difficult just in very, very practical ways. But for aesthetic reasons, you know, you have to be able to accept fine art is to accept not a process that is about pleasing, but it's about critical thinking. It's about challenging, which may have, may go back to that question that you were talking about, that I think, you know, for people to want great public art, they have to accept a critical platform for it and not. And personally, that it's not, that it has to, you have to accept that it isn't going, that's why it separates itself from design. Because, and that's, I think, for me, why I was talking about the idea of intimacy, that I think when you're in front of a public art or any artwork, you're having a conversation with the artist. And that's a very intimate experience about what it is to be human that I think an artwork can carry. Hi, I really enjoyed the presentations very much. Thank you. I'm wondering if you would each tell us, perhaps one or two artists that you really respect could be public art or not, just to get a feel of who you think is really doing it. Any century, as well. Any century, wow. I'll start with them. They've both been artists that have influenced me throughout my career, but Maya Lin, and then Ann Goldsworthy, who I had a fortune to work with, and be his apprentice for a few years. So, and that may be obvious in some of the work I do. No, it's telling not a piece. I've never guessed that he listed like 100 artists I would never guess that is. But he's great, I'd be equal to him. I'll name two off the top of my head. I think that Anish Kapoor's piece in Chicago is a very successful public artwork. I'll call it the Bean, because that's what it's called. I said this earlier. I think when a public artwork isn't actually given a nickname, you know that it's actually owned, and it doesn't matter who made the work anymore, that it's actually owned in a public way. And I'll put out Bernini, because I think the transformation of space, and whether it's architecturally or any of this object, particularly in three dimensions, to activate the space around, that's one of the things that I think is really interesting about this park is how many intersections of entry you have, and how you can create sort of eddies of activity within it. And then Bernini had this incredible way of an object actually spinning off behavior around it. And I've been influenced a lot by the work of James Terrell or Robert Irwin. People are interested in sort of perception and kind of framing nature. And Robert Irwin did a lot of the real pioneering thinking and kind of real site-specific work. And I was just recently at an art museum in Stanford University, and Irwin has one of his disc pieces there. And I had seen them years ago and kind of forgot about them. And this thing was so beautiful. I had kind of a mystical experience. If you haven't seen them, there are these acrylic bowls that he painted them or somehow surfaced them. So there's this beautiful, almost translucent white, and they sit in front of a white wall suspended in front of the wall. And he lights them in such a way that you can't tell where the artwork ends and the wall begins. It blurs the boundary between the art and the environment. And the whole thing was beautiful, almost surreal, perceptual moment. So that's all, that's, yeah, they did everybody. So that's a place called Storm King in New York that has Calda and Sarah and Irwin and Myelin and Goldsworthy and they're all phenomenal in the landscape. And then there's a kind of much more, a very different question when you go to the city, I think, where you have a tighter set of parameters around what makes a public artwork really functional is it's like someone like Pierre Regue does amazing work that's temporary in that city. The memory remains of this extraordinary event. And there's design solutions like Harry Bertoya's kind of, and this architecture itself can really contribute. It's hard to think of, for me, like there's a Picasso sculpture in downtown Manhattan, which is this kind of big concrete thing. It's really kind of a B Picasso and it was done by Anatelli after he died from a maquette. But it's amazing, you know, it's an amazing thing. I think when it comes to public, so often it's a relationship between the site and the object that to distinguish the two specific artists is very difficult. There are others that are killing it, but they're not always able to kill it. So that's the alchemy that you want for that moment where you say, oh, this is not just an amazing piece, but it's amazing because it's here. Any other questions? I wonder if you're thinking, or if you've been asked to think about the possible redesigning of the intersection that the park is right next to and that your designs for the park would be able to respond to any changes in the traffic and that that reaches on at the intersection. Well, I'll respond to that first. The scope of the project is the whole intersection. And so that is a possibility for sure to think beyond just the park. You realize the more you ask of us, the more fundraising ladders you're giving. So yeah, we're all into, yeah, absolutely do it. Just be prepared to put it up. Hi, I think Portland would love to have something that people want to come see and to create a spectacle or have that wild factor is important, whether or not it's aesthetically pleasing. That's a different issue, but Ned, your work was just blew me away, I have to say. And I was wondering what materials you were thinking of using because seeing the stainless steel didn't really feel like sort of salt of the earth, pragmatic, sustainable, meaner, you know. But then seeing your wind lights, Patrick, I mean, all of you did amazing jobs. But if you could talk a little bit about the materials and your concern for climate action or sustainability a little bit. Yeah, well, I've never been attached to a specific material. Every project's been different. Every project's been a unique response to the place and the mood and the ideas that arise and the interactions with the design team. And so yeah, use the full spectrum of materials over the years. And yeah, a lot of current projects I'm working on, there's been a lot of interest in using recycle, material, or if it's metal, using recycled metal. There's a lot of lead systems in the one planet kind of rating system where you get kind of gold stars for being lighter upon the earth for how you make things. Yeah, I'll comment because of the airport and the beetle kill trees as well. And over the years, it's always been a component in my process to see what could be reused. But I think it's also in my case and probably in one else as well. It should be of the site. It should speak of the location somehow that way. And yeah, sometimes that is steel, sometimes that's wood. I was fortunate with the DIAPs that wood was going to work engineering-wise and actually it was superior to everything else in terms of the engineering with it. I think that's always an opportunity to lessen the impact ecologically. And hopefully it's an opportunity to elevate the art as well. Someone in the front had a question. Did anyone else want to talk? I was just gonna say, I mean, I also think labor is a part of that. And I think it's interesting is how you employ people and how it's nice to have you work close to the fabricators. And for me, almost all my fabrication actually happens in my studio. So we try and keep all of those decisions really close to home. Yeah, should really should have shown that rock slide. Basically like D'Rail, Granite and Native Plots. Instead of like my first, like keep it keep it local, keep it, you know, build it out of what is here as much as one can. But then there is a kind of self-deception that can occur in that kind of like, well, I'm, as he said, not considering the labor costs or the transportation costs or the number of factors that go into it sort of the climatic impact of an artwork is very complex. But also artworks are such a tiny, tiny shape compared to what is going on every day that, you know, it's a fun conversation to have because you realize how out of control so many things are that we think are, like don't use your laptop, you know, like that's one thing. That's 10% of the world's energy output going right into your cell phones. So, you know, we have to think of like, it's every layer of this needs to be considered. That's, I think part of what makes these conversations so great though is that we all become a little more aware each time. I'm an architect and part of the challenge we face every day is solving pragmatic needs while trying to design beautiful buildings within a budget and pragmatic needs often consume most of the budget. And I'm interested in how you reconcile a budget with the pursuit of an artistic idea and the execution of it. And when you bump up against the resources, how you respond. I don't, I mean, I keep mentioning this, but I feel like those challenges become opportunities and something unique with all of us is that at least from what it appears, everyone remains engaged in that process. And I've seen it with other works of art where you distance yourself and also those decisions are made by someone else and the art gets lost to remaining engaged in the entire process to be making it in your studio or whatever you do get to make those decisions along the way. I think as artists though, we're fortunate with our process. I understand that of an architect or a designer that we get to fight for the art. And I think it is a role of the artists to fight for that experience for the intended sculpture or whatever it is and not let that go. That's why you commission us. I think the proposal from the start, actually that can be built in for me personally, this, I say the idea that there would be several sites is part of trying to figure out, I think there are a lot of loading factors in this piece. There are a lot of architectural factors, urban planning factors, like they're competing interests. It's not, you know, sometimes you get, here's a wall, it's done. There's a lot of things floating there. So for me, the idea that a solution could be really strong that has like a series of components that right up till, you know, that, you know, several years in, you could say, okay, we're actually gonna move that component or that component has to be reduced in half the size and it would still actually not, you know, affect the actual conceptual idea was part of me when I looked at this project. I thought, okay, this is what I, for me a great solution to this project will work within a budget that may change because you may, or, you know, situations, I think in this project will change a lot along the way. And so for me, it was thinking of a solution that could actually sustain its center through that and budgetarily too, but if it's part of it strong, it would still be strong. Yeah, if the proposal is, if you think about it carefully, it becomes part of the DNA of the project and it gets expressed at every level of the project and it's not, it's much less about trimming it back to suit the budget than more like, you know, you can't really trim back your DNA. Even if you get your arm chopped off, you've still got the same amount of DNA in your body. You know, it's like, it's kind of, it becomes part of the message if you get it right, like of the site itself. So it's hard to turn what I wanna express into a question, so I'll just express a very quick aesthetic desire and see if any of you have a reaction to it. And that is as a winter lover, ice and snow lover, are there ways, I like the way you each incorporated whether elements or nature elements in some of your works. And what about the notion of incorporating ice and snow, the way snow piles on trees and I don't know if you've seen Pandora's lights, but it's so, I mean, the snow and the light. Anyway, so I just, I'm looking for a reaction for how you would incorporate a love of winter into a project. So it's more than just that it looks pretty when the snow was on it, but even some way of asking the city to plow the snow a certain way so that it interacts with the art. I couldn't. It's a great, it's great. I think Boston had that missed opportunity, you know, when they had that enormous amount of snow. You should have been there and said, this is not a problem. It's a solution. Because it's all, it's true for snow, which snowmen in Santa Claus is always pretty, but also what's it like in pouring rain? Like what's it like on a really freezing cold April day when you're just sick of winter? It's the snow's kind of gone, that kind of sucks. It's got to kind of speak to all the seasons. And that's a very complex leap of imagination. Not just the seasons this year, but over many, many years to come. But I think it's actually a really good idea about this building in this snow retrieval system where it actually is, maybe drops from other parts of the city, come and dump their snow there too. You create a kind of. I have just a more general question for Sarah as the only woman on the stage here and also working in the field of public art, which I think is still very male dominated in comparison to other visual arts practices. Has that informed your work at all or motivated you to work in the public sphere more? I think, you know, it's hard to know. My father was an architect. I thought I studied architecture for a while. Also very male dominated field. There aren't a lot that aren't male dominated, but so I think, what's dominoes? That's a bit true. That's not true, it is not true as in gymnastics. So I think that it's a difficult question to answer. I think that, you know, it's a difficult question to answer. I think that, I guess the way to answer that is I have two daughters. I would love to see more women role models for them. I have one question which is, what do you perceive as the greatest challenges in this project? I think that Matthew approached it a little bit, but so obviously thrills are sort of easy to articulate, but what do you think the challenges will be? I think each of you gets to answer that. You know, women are just kidding. I think the challenges are, I think the challenges are bringing together, I think the challenges are actually the best part of the project. I think that the project has potential to have a park that does many things at once, and I think there can be an artwork that doesn't just do one thing, but that for me shows up in many places that it's discovered over time in fragments over the space, very specifically, because I think that that place is already used in pockets, that there's a place that seems more private, there's a place that seems more public, that there, even within a small area, there are many locations of activity, and I think this is more the way people use parks more than ever, is that there are niches where people do different kinds of activities, and when I read the proposal of this idea that there would be food trucks in one area, that there would be a place that would be good for kids in another area, that there would be a place where people would be on the internet or food, that it would have a multidisciplinary, this idea of pockets rather than one moment that everything converges on was a really exciting part of the proposal, but it's also the challenge is that you actually activate it in many levels, you know, that you think about snow, that you think about heat, that it can be flexible. I think that the artwork has to be very flexible in the space. I think two of the main challenges I've seen have been here today. The motor, the automobiles, I find that that can be very distracting for art and how to not overcome it, but also embrace it, and then as well as the evening experience with the light. There's a very exciting, the Eastland Hotel, which I know is probably iconic for the city, but it's a challenge, and it's a challenge to somehow at least compliment that or overcome it and there's other lights, but how the art can actually be seen as it's intended dealing with those factors that aren't gonna go away. And I think a lot of the challenges of a site are things that hopefully landscape architects will address, you know, kind of the things you guys mentioned, you know, the cars, the kind of really making it feel like a space, and I think it's one of the things that I think is really fortunate about the way you guys have set up this whole thing is that the landscape architects and the artists are coming together at the same time. A lot of public art projects, you don't have that wonderful thing of being able to like rethink this whole plaza. It's like, you know, a very typical public art project would be, we'd be brought in and like, okay, here's this plaza that isn't really working, but maybe a piece of art will save it. And so then, you know, you're trying to like solve all these other problems and it's often an impossible task. So I think the way you guys have set this whole thing up is great potential for making this place into a real place. Yeah, and I think just to follow up on Sarah's comments, I think that the kind of making it fully inhabited at every level of participation is key. Also engaging the whole plaza all the way to the museum, which I know is a kind of enigmatic presence, currently sort of distanced from that by the traffic flow. I feel there's a way to make it sort of aesthetically cohesive, although the building has is, you know, quite singular, I don't think it's a write off. I think I'm pretty, pretty fond of it. And I think it's, there's a kind of way to extend its geometry into that kind of fragmentation of public uses and actually make it more of a magnet than it is, which is also, you know, it's both the challenge and the reward is to kind of extend the wildness of the park, the idea of a cultural wildness and fragmentation and unify it with a kind of sense of social meaning, which at the moment they kind of live in two opposite parts of the square, but I think they could be brought together and kind of connect somehow, that seems to be, which is exactly where that traffic flow happens. That's the kind of the perfect metaphor for like what could, the difficulties and the reward of that, those things could be brought into proximity and be like, wow, this is a place, like a full place that's cohesive from into it. Well, with that, we are out of time. I'd like to thank the PMA for hosting us, see it's CTN for filming us, and I'd like to thank these amazing artists for coming here and presenting their work. We're very fortunate to have such great options to choose from, so thank you for your time. Please fill out your surveys, leave them at the table up front, please.