Stainless Dreaming

Next up we're looking at Stainless Dreaming the large Lee Kelly sculpture at the Portland Community College Rock Creek campus. The college's art collection page about it describes it thusly:

Lee Kelly's unmistakable sculptures can be found in many public collections in the Northwest. Stainless Dreaming exemplifies the artist's style and technique, in which he welds together pieces of stainless steel, working the surfaces to create pattern and gesture. His abstract forms address and often shape the spaces around them, as if they were doors or openings. Kelly, who was born in Idaho, attended the Museum Art School (now the Pacific Northwest Museum of Art.) He has traveled widely, particularly in India and Nepal, whose architecture, colors, and patterns have had a profound effect on his work.

The Portland Art Museum's Kelly walking tour (which actually involves a lot more driving than walking) gives this a date of 1995. PCC info page gives a date of 2003, but that's just when they bought it. By random luck I just happened to wander up to it during a brief bit of sunshine, so I think I was able to capture the look of the worked surfaces the description talks about. I have no idea how that effect is created -- maybe by randomly attacking it with an angle grinder and then polishing it up afterward? In any case, you absolutely don't get the full effect of it without direct sunlight. Which is kind of unfortunate, if you think about it, since we don't get a lot of nice sunny days in this part of the world, and most of those come during the summer when the fewest students are on campus to maybe notice it. Still, if you were in the market for a large Kelly sculpture, your most important decision was whether you wanted a shiny stainless steel one, or a rust-brown Cor-Ten™ steel one, because those were your only two choices. The latter would have gone really well -- almost too well -- with the groovy 1970s look of the original Rock Creek Campus buildings, if the school had wanted to embrace that particular aesthetic as an identity. But all of the more recent campus buildings went with a respectable, generic suburban office park look, and installing a big Cor-Ten™ whatzit among those just wouldn't fit; it would be sort of like installing a disco ball in an Intel clean room.