Gathering In

The next bit of MAX art we're looking at is Gathering In/Gathering Rail by Christine Bourdette, at Hillsboro's Hatfield Government Center station, the far end of the Blue Line. The link above used to go to an RACC project page with a brief description of the art, but this part of the RACC website's been broken with a PHP script error for several months now, apparently without anyone noticing -- or figuring out how to fix it. So instead here's a hilarious page explaining why PHP is "a fractal of bad design".

Consumer Reliquaries

Today's adventure takes us back to Lloyd Center again (honestly, I'm not taking kickbacks from them or anything), this time to the parking garage on the south side of the mall. If you go to the ground floor and look closely, you'll eventually run across Consumer Reliquaries, a series of small birdhouse-shaped metal boxes, each containing a common consumer object or two, showcased as if they're precious objects or holy relics on display. That Smithsonian inventory entry (link above) is pretty terse:

SCULPTOR: Bourdette, Christine 1952-
MEDIUM:   bronze, glass, steel, found objects, electric lights

Like the nearby In the Tree Tops and the Capitalism fountain, Consumer Reliquaries arrived in 1991 as part of the Lloyd Center remodel. During the Reagan-Bush era, there was a hot genre of art like this about consumerism, kitsch, and pop culture. Sometimes celebrating it, other times satirizing it, and often a bit of both. This one seems to be a bit of both. The last time I posted a photo of one of the boxes was back in 2006, after someone had slightly vandalized it, pushing the needle further to the satire end of the dial.

(Apologies for the scatterbrained 2006 blog post, by the way. I was home sick with a cold that day and cobbled together a post with some random photos I had lying around, followed by some random links from my RSS feed. Those would all go to Twitter or Tumblr now, but back then neither had been invented yet, and every day we blogged six miles through the snow, uphill, both ways. I like to think I've gotten better at this blog business since 2006, or at least I've found a sorta-interesting niche to stick to.)

Anyway, Bourdette also created Snails in Fields Park, and Cairns at the north end of the downtown Transit Mall. Neither have anything to do with consumer culture, as far as I know; the art world's moved on since 1991, or at least the city's public art buyers have.

Snails

Portland's new The Fields city park includes a number of small sculptures here and there. They, collectively, are Snails, by Portland sculptor Christine Bourdette. Her description of Snails, via RACC:

My goal has been to create episodic moments of surprise with works of small scale—objects of simple form but with a small amount of intimate detail that an adult would bend down to look at and a child would find of familiar scale. The thought of the garden paradise—Elysian Fields—came in to play, as well as natural forms that might reflect the eddying, spiraling, form of the park’s design. It seemed an opportunity to create work playful and quirky that somehow reflects the idea of escape, release, imagination, and slowing down—reasons we go to the parks.

The snail—a creature of every garden, beloved or not, but necessary to the natural scheme—is the basis of my imagery here. Its spiral shell is its retreat wherever it is and is a metaphor for renewal and regeneration. The mathematical sequence of that spiral underlies the growth patterns of nature, though these works depart from elegant mathematics as they are eccentric abstractions. And, of course, there is the matter of its pace; the snail is another reminder to slow down, to be in the present.

Cairns

Today's stop on the occasional tour of transit mall art takes us to the far north end of the transit mall, near Union Station, home to the scattered pieces of Cairns. From TriMet's Green Line public art guide:

To create her series of sculptures for the Union Station area, Christine Bourdette was inspired by the man-made stacks of stones that have traditionally served as landmarks for navigation and as memorials. Cairns consists of a series of five stacked-slate forms that mark the path to the light rail stations near Glisan at NW 5th and 6th.

I can't say I have a strong opinion either way about any of the individual cairns or the collection as a whole. Your eyes just tend to sort of gaze right past them. But up close you notice the texture of the stone, which I absolutely love. I see lots of search results for "stacked slate", which seems to mean pieces of slate split perpendicular to their natural grain. It's a neat look but possibly not an infinitely versatile one; a commercially available garden fountain I ran across looks just like Cairns, but smaller and with water spilling out the top.