This All Happened More or Less

One of the newer public artworks in Portland (at the time of writing) is This All Happened More Or Less, a collection of tiny figures scattered along inner SE Division St. These were created in 2014 by artists Crystal Schenk and Shelby Davis for a city streetscape project that also added bioswales and other gentrifying goodies. The RACC press release described the project thusly:

Appropriately titled “This All Happened More or Less,” the bronze characters created by the artists were inspired by their observations of activity along Division. The scale of these bronze figures (much different than the scale usually seen in public art) can draw a viewer in close enough to imagine a story behind each of the figures that vary from active, such as a kid on a skateboard, to inactive, such as waiting for a bus or sitting quietly with a pet dog. The artists have said, “We are merely suggesting stories and we want people to draw their own conclusions, to fill in all of the details, and to follow their imaginations.”

The title is almost, not quite, the opening line of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Which I admit I haven't read since high school, so the allusion sort of escapes me at the moment.