Out of the Brambles

Ok, so today we're at the Lents/Foster MAX station to look at Out of the Brambles, the multicolored sculpture on the west side of the elevated train platform. (Recall that 'today' is a very flexible word here on this humble blog, this time even more than usual. We'll get to that in a bit.) This sculpture was created by Northwest sculptor Wayne Chabre, who longtime Gentle Reader(s) might remember from old posts about Connections at the Multnomah County offices on Hawthorne, and Second Growth at the Albina/Mississippi MAX station. His description of it, from a Wayback Machine copy of an old page about it:

A common theme during interviews of Lents community members was childhood memories of berry picking. Formidable defenses allow these fruiting vines to survive, reproduce and provide sustenance for animals and humans; berry plants also protect the earth under them, the water beside them, and the multitude of small animals and birds within their thickets. A symbol of tenacious nature, berries helped support the coming of civilization, and will remain to engulf and dismantle what we have built after our tenure on Earth. Berry vines are also a metaphor for life’s struggles: getting past the thorns to the fruits. Wild berries transcend the differences between all the cultures that have populated this area. They were revered and heavily utilized by Native populations, and have been loved, hybridized, cultivated and tended by each succeeding generation and ethnic group.

I had linked to the original page in a 2013 post about Lents Hybrids, the other art at the same MAX station. That and a post at a long-defunct neighborhood business blog were the only mentions I could find about it on the interwebs, and because 2013 was roughly a billion internet years ago -- internet years are still a thing, right? -- both links have long since gone stale. The vanished lents dot biz site went away years ago, was not archived anywhere, and the name now belongs to a shady domain squatter page, which is why I'm not linking to it. And since I didn't quote the relevant blog post of theirs at the time, I have no idea what they actually said about the art here. Oh well.

The rest of my notes for this post seemed to naturally fall into a rough timeline. Partly about the art itself, and partly the chain of events leading up to this post happening in late 2020 (which I realize might be completely uninteresting to everyone besides me):

• The MAX Green Line opened on September 12th 2009. As part of the grand opening, TriMet created public art tour guides for the I-205 and downtown parts of the new line, which I treated as sort of a "gotta catch 'em all" todo list for a while. Note that both of those links are also Wayback Machine copies, again because link rot. At least they left the pages up until sometime in 2016, which I guess is a respectable amount of time.
• Here are a few old posts from 2006-07 when they were busy building the downtown part of the new line. Not really relevant to anything in this post, but they came up in a search and 2006 is roughly 4 billion internet years ago, so I figured I'd work them in somewhere.
• I finally got around to riding the semi-new line on July 2nd 2010. I know this because I thought I'd be hip with the latest social media technology and live-tweet my semi-thrilling adventures riding the train out to a suburban mall and back during a heavy rainstorm. While taking photos with a new Blackberry -- my first phone with a camera -- and posting them to a long-defunct add-on service called "Twitpic", which is why the photo links in that thread don't work anymore.
• The page I quoted about Out of the Brambles gives a date of 2012, so it went in after the MAX line opened (and after my little 2010 snarkfest). I guess this would explain why it wasn't listed in the 2009 TriMet art guide. The other 2010 photos look dark and miserable enough that I suspect I would have skipped Out of the Brambles that day anyway, had it been there, since you can't see it without getting off the train.
• On the other hand, the entire "Lents Town Center" area has been completely transformed in the years after I took those original photos. The Portland Development Commission -- the autonomous agency tasked with doing the thing they know not to call "urban renewal" anymore -- had dreamed of gentrifying this area for decades and finally got their wish, and the mishmash of parking lots and low-rise commercial buildings has been transformed into a few square blocks of apartment buildings -- unfortunately of uniform height and fairly nondescript style. So it might have been interesting to have a few 'before' photos for comparison, but it was raining that day and I didn't realize what was coming, so I don't. Oh well.
• As for why it showed up after the line opened, my personal theory is that it wasn't part of the original plan, but when people got a look at the hulking grey concrete structure for the MAX platform, it was a lot uglier in person than in the early-2000s CGI that had sold people on the plan, and something had to be done. And Out of the Brambles does a great job in that respect, as the concrete train platform becomes just a neutral backdrop instead of the focus of attention.
• A bit later I realized I could get a few public art posts out of those poor-quality Blackberry photos, and since it's the internet (and nobody's paying me to do this) I could just make some self-deprecating remarks about the photos instead of going back again to take better ones. So I spent a bit of time in December 2013 writing them up and tagged them all with "greenline" in case anybody wants to binge (briefly) on bad photos of circa-2009 public art. The Lents Hybrids post I mentioned earlier was part of this batch, and in putting it together I found that one long-gone blog post mentioning Out of the Brambles, and it went on one of my todo lists. Not as a super high priority, but as something to track down at whatever point I was in the area again and remembered to look at the right todo list.
• Just for comparison, the Second Growth post happened around this time too. That post went from taking photos to hitting "Publish" in 5 days, which goes to show that I can sometimes get things done in a reasonable amount of time, so long as I remember not to forget, and prioritize (or misprioritize) getting them done ahead of various other professional and personal goals.
• While putting this current post together, I realized Chabre made a couple of other things at the same MAX station, with their own separate names and everything, so two more todo items just went onto another list. Obviously there's no ETA on if or when those might show up here, but they definitely won't appear before this dumb pandemic is over.
• I did check the library's database of Oregonian back issues, and found a few articles mentioning Second Growth (like this review) from around then when the MAX Yellow Line opened, or an entertaining interview from 2002. I don't see anything similar for Out of the Brambles, I think largely because the Oregonian no longer has the staff, or the spare column inches, or the inclination to publish stories about art these days.
• Earlier in 2014, the Twitpic service either went out of business or was about to, so I had to go back and replace all my embedded Twitpics with Flickr copies of the same photos. I'd apparently had the foresight to make backups of my crappy Blackberry photos, or maybe I'd been warned this was coming, I don't recall now. Anyway, I re-uploaded them to Flickr this time and updated the affected posts, in yet another episode in the long twilight struggle against bit rot. The end of Twitpic was inevitable after Twitter introduced their own builtin photo sharing feature, but I was kind of sad to see them go, since embedding those photos in blog posts involved a completely unapproved kludge I'd hacked together somehow. I have no idea how it worked anymore, but I was just a little proud of it at the time.
• Next we skip forward to July 2016, when I finally had a reason to be out in that corner of town anyway, namely to visit the new-ish Zoiglhaus brewpub just steps away from the MAX station. So if you don't care for this set of photos, I'm going to blame it on me starting to drift off into a pilsner-assisted schnitzel coma for the afternoon.
• And then the hard work of writing a blog post began, by which I mean those photos sat around in Flickr for about a year, until I created a draft post for them in June 2017, saved it, and didn't touch it again until a few days ago. By which I mean mid-October 2020, in case other stuff comes up and I forget about this post again for another few years or whatever.