Unseen Worlds

Next up we're back in industrial North Portland for another installment in the ongoing public art series. This time^[1] we're taking a look at Unseen Worlds (2002) by artist Fernanda d'Agostino (whose work has appeared here a lot). This comes to us via Portland's Bureau of Environmental Services, specifically their Columbia Blvd. Wastewater Treatment Plant, which is one reason the mainstream guides for tourists don't tell you this is a must-see. (C'mon, stop snickering for a minute and let's pretend we're all serious people having a serious chat about capital-A Art for a minute.) Here's the official RACC description, which is repeated across several pages covering different sub-categories of the art here:

The artworks along this path depict various aspects of the wetlands and reparian environments of the site. You’ll find images of microorganisms and macro invertebrates used to test water quality. The paving inlays hint at the tidal nature of the slough. The “Dendritic Bridge” frames a view of the intersection of industrial and natural landscapes and you’ll find a bird list for the site beneath your feet. Birdhouses provide bird habitat and the perches reference feathers, beaks and some of the tools used in the sewer treatment plant. Looking through the three holes in the “Periscope Stone” you’ll see the favorite perch for Bald Eagles that frequent the park in early spring, the composter at the treatment plant, and the biggest snag (favorite all round habitat) on the site.

So why is this here? The art's located along a side branch of the Columbia Slough Trail skirts around the east side of the plant. On the south end, it almost[2] connects you to the Peninsula Crossing Trail, Evidently either the trail, or the Inverness bridge, or the Big Pipe, or some other capital project here generated enough Percent for Art money to fund some art and, I guess, give trail users something less sewer-y to look at and think about on their way through the area. Which I guess is nice if you're a squeamish grownup with delicate sensibilities, which covers just about everyone here. I mean, the agency's name -- "Bureau of Environmental Services" -- is a euphemism, and they would apparently be thrilled if the public saw them as the agency that's somehow in charge of herons and salmon and rain, and their engineers spend their days working on the city's mystical bond with same. Or something along those lines anyway.

But that's just one way to approach the problem. Next time BES has a major capital project here -- and there's bound to be another one sooner or later -- I hereby propose we put the city's eight year olds in charge of the whole public art program. I mean, grade school kids generally, but especially the eight year olds. And instead of no-fun grownups guiding them toward another batch of the same old tasteful nature art that everyone's supposed to like -- instead of doing that we really lean into whatever the eight year olds come up with, just this once. Obviously in general this is no way to run a city, and calling them "subject matter experts" is kind of a stretch, but they at least spend a lot of time giggling about the topic.

Also it's not like this would be unprecedented in the wider art world, although most of the examples that come back in a quick interweb search seem to be unintentional.

• The, ah, tightly coiled new W Hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland. I mean, it's Scotland -- even if people thought it looked like a local walnut-chocolate snack, or a "haute couture blindfold", rather than a big pile of poo, they wouldn't admit to it.
• Meanwhile in Philadelphia (possibly America's answer to Scotland), the local art museum acquired one of those giant Claes Oldenburg sculptures in 2011. Paint Torch is a 51' high tilted paintbrush, with a nearby blob of red paint, celebrating the art of painting. And that's all it was until one day in 2015 when artist Kid Hazo happened along and attached a grinning mouth and two big googly eyes to the paint blob, which was instantly and utterly transformed. In an age of omni-surveillance and zero tolerance everything, this is the only kind of art intervention that works: It can be undone in seconds, but can't be unseen no matter how much time elapses.
• Meanwhile in Boston, in 2023 the city welcomed The Embrace, the city's weird but official new MLK memorial. Said to be inspired by a photo of MLK hugging Corretta Scott King shortly after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the $10M giant-sized art tries and fails to show just the hug in a sorta-minimalist way by depicting a tangled nightmare of disembodied arms and general biology, inspiring scatological thoughts over on Reddit.
• San Jose, California's 1994 statue of the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl depicts him coiled like a rattlesnake, and seen from a certain distance bystanders tend to just see the coiled shape and draw conclusions. General consensus seems to be that even if it was a poo emoji statue, it's still an upgrade over the statue it replaced, a pioneer so odious he was canceled way back in 1988.
• In Chicago, an artist made a fountain depicting a semi-realistic pile of the stuff, even labeling it "SHIT FOUNTAIN" to remove any lingering doubt. Seems he created it to criticize his neighbors for not cleaning up after their dogs.
• Meanwhile in Rotterdam, back in 2018, a local art museum hosted a Vienna-based art collective and their giant photorealistic logs of poo. They may have realized, late in the process, that this might not be quite enough to get a rise out of jaded Dutch museum-goers, and added another conceptual bit to the mix:
  

  Now, the sculptures rest on Persian rugs and are stared at by visitors wearing naked suits featuring various shapes and sizes of male and female sexual parts.
  
  For Gantner, the naked suits are “a gift to visitors” that enhance the exhibition and their own experience of it.
  
  “You step into the costume and you immediately transform into another being. People don’t know anymore what your job is, if you’re rich, poor, male or female, so you forget a little bit about all these rules.”

• Which brings us to Orlando, Florida, where we meet the most crass one of all, a giant walk-in inflatable poo emoji that was in town temporarily to promote some sort of deodorizer spray.

Since I'm way too old to submit ideas to the contest I just suggested, and I'm also not an official artist and ineligible if they did a boring regular art proposal process, let me just tell you my idea. You know how grand entrances to important buildings are often flanked by art of guardian animals, right? Things like sculptures of lions sitting outside library entrances. Imagine a pair of giant stainless steel poo emojis, grinning as they flank the main entrance to the plant. Coiling in opposite directions to maintain classical symmetry, and bidding the visitor welcome to where the magic happens.

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Footnotes

[1]. About this post

You might have noticed that the photos in this post are a bit subpar and few in number. If you look closer you might notice they were taken wayyy back in 2014. This is another one of those posts that lingered around in drafts for ages because I couldn't figure out what it was called, and without a name I don't even have a title for the post, and the rest of the research gets pretty difficult, too, and I'd basically given up on this one but never got around to deleting it. Then a few days ago I was poking around on the revamped RACC website again and noticed entries for the art next to the sewer plant, and I will swear up and down and three times sideways that these database entries didn't exist until quite recently. So this time I couldn't move forward because the website that's supposed to be the single source of truth about these things just sort of neglected to mention the art here, for unknown reasons.

Intellectual Ecosystem

Here's a short YouTube clip of Intellectual Ecosystem, a video art installation on an outside wall of the Portland State Student Rec Center building, facing the Urban Plaza. The university's PR describes it as:

...a video work that uses imagery of PSU student performances, faculty work, and archival holdings that were researched and filmed over a one year period.  Nearly forty faculty members and student groups were engaged by the artists.  
...
“Intellectual Ecosystem” contains a total of 160 minutes of original video content, projected in a custom programmed sequence to remix the clips.  The work is viewable from inside the ASRC and also animates the busy Urban Plaza from a 12’ x 16’ transparent holographic screen that, even when the projector is active, allows the activities of students inside the building to become another layer of the composition.  The title of the work is inspired by PSU Environmental Studies Professor John Reuter, who has called for the creation of new metaphors and the identification of characteristic patterns to allow people to grasp the immensity of natural processes.  

The installation was created in 2010 by artists Fernanda D’Agostino and Valerie Otani; you might recognize both names from other Portland public art projects that have appeared here previously. D'Agostino created Urban Hydrology and Patterns May be an Action, or the Trace Left by an Action along the MAX line at PSU, Icons of Transformation at North Portland's Overlook MAX stop

Otani created Voices of Remembrance and Prowform & Propform along the Yellow Line, Money Tree at the SE Powell Green Line station, and Folly Bollards at the downtown Peforming Arts Center, I mean, "Portland'5 Centers for the Arts". (Yes, that's an apostrophe-five, and it's there on purpose. It's a terminally silly name, and some marketing consultant probably made a ton of money thinking of it.) The two artists collaborated on the Flows and Eddies sculptures around the Smith & Bybee Wetlands nature area.

Flows and Eddies

Here are a few photos of Flows and Eddies, the public art scattered around the Smith & Bybee Wetlands. Flows and Eddies is the name for the overall project, which is divided into a few sub-groupings, each of which in turn consists of a few individual sculptures. Two of these groupings are represented in these photos:

Ecology Stones

Forms found in the natural habitat of the lakes are carved in monumental scale basalt boulders, creating a “teaching landscape” that awakens viewers to the rich plant and animal life that surrounds them.

Mussel Shell

A large carved stone based on the fresh water mussels found in the lakes marks the entrance to the canoe launch. The lines of a mussel’s shell mark the years of its life. A second mussel shell paving stone is etched with the dates and cycles of time of important events in the history, prehistory and natural history of the lakes, making note of the ‘deep time’ found in wild places.

Not pictured are Habitat Reefs, Habitat Trees and Seasonal Encampment, mostly because I have no idea where they are. Smith & Bybee Wetlands is a huge place, and the art seems to be scattered a bit randomly all over the park.

Flows and Eddies is a fairly recent addition to the park, only arriving in 2004. Like Drawing on the River beneath the St. Johns Bridge in Cathedral Park, it was actually funded with One Percent for Art money from the still-unopened Wapato Jail. The jail borders a remote corner of Bybee Lake near the old St. Johns Landfill, and as you might imagine it doesn't welcome casual visitors. The then-sheriff figured it was silly to spend the public art money at the jail where nobody would ever see it, so a few outside projects were funded instead, including this one.

If you like these, you might also check out Urban Hydrology on the transit mall at Portland State University. Like Flows and Eddies it's a collection of nature-inspired Fernanda D'Agostino sculptures, but they're based on electron microscope images of diatoms. It's possibly my favorite of the new crop of transit mall art that arrived with the MAX Green Line. For whatever that's worth. If Google results are any indication, I may be the only person on Earth who pays attention to this stuff.

Icons of Transformation

Here's another stop on our occasional tour of the art along the MAX Yellow Line; I don't already have a full set of photos like I did with the Green Line last year, so posts are likely to show up with haphazard timing and in no particular order. Today's stop takes us to the Overlook Park station, which sits next to the park of the same name. The north and southbound stations each have a glass tower featuring a number of faces. TriMet's art guide for the Yellow Line says of them:

Fernanda D'Agostino was inspired by research on the healing power of light and nature.

• Light towers modeled after roadside shrines in Poland feature portraits of community members overlaid with images of nature.
• Art glass in the windscreen suggests the transforming power of nature.
• Community map artist Margaret Eccles created a symbol for the relationship between good health and community.

D'Agostino's website bio has one line mentioning this project, which is how I know what it's called. The Yellow Line guide annoyingly doesn't mention key details like that.

The Polish theme is here thanks to the St. Stanislaus Polish Catholic church just north of the MAX station, while the health theme is due to the nearby Kaiser medical center. The more I read about the endless MAX design process, the more I realize just how much diplomacy and compromise went into the design of each station. (And how else would we get a hybrid Polish/healthcare themed station here, and a hybrid maritime/stormwater theme at the Prescott station?) A Catholic Sentinel article (which focuses primarily on the Polish aspect of the MAX station) gives an indication of what the project was like:

'I wanted to show how people's inner life, whoever they are, is really, really rich,' says D'Agostino, who worked with a 175-year-old German stained-glass company to produce the multi-colored and multi-layered panels.

'I wanted the towers to mean something to anybody whatever their spiritual life, whether they are a secular humanist, or a Catholic or a Jew. I was thinking of the spirit as people's inner life and I was getting into people's heads. . . . I was after what gives people a sense of wonder.'

Initial art committee meetings about two years ago presented a 'conundrum,' D'Agostino said. Prevalent in the committee were members of the Polish community, which has peopled St. Stanislaus Parish and a community hall on North Interstate Avenue for a century. But also in the group were representatives of Kaiser Permanente health clinics at the station site and who pushed for some kind of healthcare motif. Added to that were neighborhood leaders touting racial diversity and conservationists pointing to the area's reputation as a gateway to nature.

This is a city that loves process, or at least a city that's easily intimidated by people who love process. I imagine most artists (and most people in general) wouldn't be too thrilled about partnering with a micromanaging Committee of Concerned Citizens and Umpteen Other Stakeholders. I used to wonder why so many TriMet commissions go to the same five or six people, year in and year out; I'm sure tolerance for process pain is a big part of the answer. A track record of delivering on time and on budget probably doesn't hurt either. Possibly we ought to consider sending a few of them to the state legislature. I'm not saying we'd be better off, but I doubt we'd be any worse off.

Patterns May be an Action, or the Trace Left by an Action

Today's adventure in obscure stuff takes us to the Portland State campus again, to Patterns May be an Action, or the Trace Left by an Action, on SW Broadway. It's a set of granite panels with nature-inspired patterns on them, a companion piece to the nearby diatom sculptures titled Urban Hydrology.

Unlike its companion piece, there's almost nothing about this on the interwebs. Which is a shame, because I'm curious about the various patterns here: Are they simply nature-inspired, or are they images of something in particular, or...? None of the usual sources (RACC, Smithsonian, various online public art guides, etc.) have an entry for Patterns as far as I can tell. It does get a brief mention in PSU's Historic Resource List (even though it's not actually old), and a brief mention in the new Walking Portland, 2nd Edition, and all the other results I see are for my Flickr photos you see here. The artist's website isn't a lot of help here either, although it talks about a number of other interesting projects of hers.

Urban Hydrology

Today's adventure in transit mall art takes us to SW 6th Avenue between Harrison & Hall, home to Urban Hydrology, which is one my favorites among the new pieces that arrived along with the MAX Green Line. TriMet's Green Line public art tour describes thusly:

Urban Hydrology, 2009

ARTIST

Fernanda D'Agostino

LOCATION

On 6th Avenue, between Mill and Hall streets

DESCRIPTION

With Urban Hydrology, Fernanda D'Agostino reflects some of the environmental science taking place at PSU in an attempt to thread the needle of beauty, abstraction and content while appealing to both academic and casual viewers. Twelve oversized diatoms carved in granite are sited in the biofiltration strips unique to the the southern portion of the Portland Mall.

An RACC page about the piece describes it in more detail:

Twelve carved granite sculptures based on Scanning Electron Microscopy images of diatoms used to determine water quality in urban waterways. The sculptures are sited along a three block long bio filtration landscape strip in downtown Portland, Oregon, adjacent to Portland State University.

So these shapes are pleasant to look at -- particularly in close up -- and they're based on electron microscope images of diatoms. I already liked them as abstract forms before I learned what they were modeled on, and the diatom angle makes it just that much cooler. Call me a science dork if you like. I really won't be offended.