Sunday, January 01, 2017

Romona Falls

Next up, we're looking at Romona Falls, a sculpture/fountain in VanWa's Turtle Place plaza. The Waymarking page for it (1st link) notes that it was created by artists Greg Conyne and Wendy Armstrong, & includes the text of the plaque attached to it, which I'm shamelessly copying & pasting here:

For this sculpture/fountain the artists reclaimed used but familiar objects from a number of sources and combined them in an entirely new and different context. Old equipment from Clark Public Utilities, C-Tran and the City of Vancouver offer clues to the past expressed in a somewhat nonsensical way.

The rough, rusted and used appearance works well with the elements of the theme: Conserve Reuse Recycle. Seasonal rainwater from the roof of the adjacent building is captured to provide a portion of the falling water. The name "Ramona Falls" recalling a well known site on the slopes of Mount Hood.

As I noted in the earlier Turtle Place post, the plaza has since been torn up and rebuilt as a terminal for Vancouver's new Bus Rapid Transit system (which will open in early January 2017), but supposedly they're keeping the fountain as well as the plaza's giant mural.

As for the fountain's sorta-namesake, here are Wikipedia & Oregon Hikers Field Guide pages about Ramona Falls, since I've somehow neglected to go take my own photos of it yet. I have no idea why the fountain is spelled slightly differently, whether it's an in joke I'm not privy to, or maybe a typo that was caught late in the process & was too expensive to fix. Beats me.

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