Vincent, Waiting for Alice

In SW Portland's Pendleton Park, a giant 8' rabbit statue watches over the playground. This is Vincent, Waiting for Alice. It's yet another Keith Jellum sculpture; at this point I've lost track of how many of those I've covered here. I'm honestly not seeking them out particularly, but I keep running into them everywhere, all the time. In any case, he has a blurb about Vincent, Waiting for Alice on its RACC page:

In Louis Carroll's “Alice in Wonderland,” Alice is lured into her journey by the site of a white rabbit that keeps dashing out of sight, just beyond her reach. At one point in the tale, Alice finally encounters the white rabbit that is late for a party given by the duchess. However, the rabbit has misplaced its gloves and fan and sends Alice to retrieve them. As an adult, I still delight in the playfulness of this story and see it as a metaphor for pursuing one's dreams - even when the dream seems beyond one's reach. May your imaginations run wild in the pursuit of dreams!

Designing a giant Lewis Carroll rabbit is probably harder than it sounds; you have to avoid anything that remotely resembles a character from the Disney version, because lawyers, or any Warner Bros. rabbit character, because other lawyers, and you also have to avoid making a terrifying Donnie Darko rabbit. Ok, a scary Donnie Darko rabbit statue actually sounds kind of awesome, but there would be Concerned Neighborhood Parents if you tried that, especially in this part of town. And then you'd get insufferable indie film dudes making pilgrimages here from across the globe, bored significant others in tow, which is not exactly an improvement over neighborhood kids having a normal fun day at the park.

I don't really have any more material about this particular rabbit, but YouTube is full of random video clips about giant rabbits, Carroll-esque or otherwise, so here's a brief selection.

Dr. McCoy's run-in with a giant Alice in Wonderland rabbit (which is actually a robot), from the original Star Trek episode Shore Leave

Donnie Darko:

The aforementioned Donnie Darko rabbit. Apparently he's named "Frank".

"White Rabbit", the Jefferson Airplane song. (Pssst! It's about drugs! *clutches pearls*)

And, most terrifyingly of all, a bit of vintage Easter ragtime piano from the Lawrence Welk show, because the 70s were a dark and primitive time.

Mimir

Today's obscure public art excursion takes us to NW 27th between Thurman & Upshur, where a mysterious bust sits on a pedestal, seemingly a monument to some important (but nonhuman) historical figure. This is Mimir, another sculpture by Keith Jellum; several other works of his have appeared here previously: Electronic Poet, Chimney Swift, Portal, and Transcendence,.

A 2007 Stumptown Stumper in the Portland Tribune wrote about the mysterious bust:

The piece is grounded in Norse mythology. According to one legend, the god Mimir was sent by Odin to rival gods to help resolve a dispute, but Odin received his envoy's head in return. Since Mimir was noted for his wise counsel, Odin mounted the head as an oracle for his Aesir gods.

'I'm not sure where (the image) came from,' 67-year-old Jellum told Stumper. 'It's just at the time I was doing a whole lot of drawings, and it just popped out and sort of appealed to me. It's part fish, part space creature.'

Jellum said he added the hieroglyphic inscription on the plaque as a 'play upon plaques. You see all these plaques around and they give all this 'important' information. I thought it was just irrelevant to the piece. I like the idea of putting something up there that didn't have any information on it.'

The Smithsonian Art Inventory description is terse but intriguing: "Decorative obelisk with a mask mounted at the top. The mask has a cone-like nose and tusks. It wears a layered breastplate with shoulder pads".

The Smithsonian page also mentions that the statue is "administered" by the city Parks Bureau, which caught my eye because I was curious about the little plaza where Mimir is located. Because, well, that's the sort of thing I tend to wonder about. The plaza's essential to selling the gag: It looks like a whole city park dedicated to the memory of a heroic yet mysterious fish alien. The experience is not unlike visiting a strange foreign city, with parks and statues and cryptic inscriptions honoring people you've never heard of. I guess fittingly, the plaza isn't actually a city park; Portland Maps says the parcel is connected to belongs to the Upshur House Apartments, a large affordable housing complex immediately east of here. The property as classified as a "subsidized garden", whatever that is, and apparently it's been exempted from property taxes since 2009.

A 2010 Daily Journal of Commerce story about renovations at the then-dilapidated apartment complex mentions that it was originally built and later renovated by Walsh Construction, the same firm that commissioned several of the other Jellum sculptures that I've covered before. So that seems to have been a fruitful long-term partnership. I'm starting to think I should just track down random projects of theirs and look around for the art.

Chimney Swift

Here's a new weathervane sculpture, titled Chimney Swift, on Portland State's brand new University Pointe student housing tower, which opened last fall to mixed reviews. Unlike a lot of recent posts here, I didn't find this one on a map first; I was just walking along minding my own business when I noticed the sign, which helpfully points out that the piece itself us up on the roof of the building. It turns out to be another work by Keith Jellum, the same guy behind Electronic Poet (overhead at the Galleria MAX stop), Transcendence (the salmon crashing through a building near the South Park Blocks), and Portal (the hammer arch on SW 1st near the Ross Island Bridge). Portal sits in front of the offices of the same construction company that built University Pointe and donated Chimney Swift. And with that, well, that's all I know about Chimney Swift.

Chimney swifts are another matter; the local variety is the Vaux's Swift, best known in the Portland for colonizing the chimney at Chapman School, in NW Portland, each fall. This draws crowds of human spectators, and often a few hungry hawks. I've gone to watch a few times but I've never brought a camera along, believe it or not. YouTube's full of Chapman School swift videos, though.

Electronic Poet

If you've ever waited at the westbound Galleria MAX stop in downtown Portland, you may have noticed a strange metal object overhead, with a red LED display on one side displaying mysterious text snippets. This is Electronic Poet, which RACC describes as:

Keith Jellum’s “Electronic Poet” displays several curated collections of poems programmed in an evolving loop. The programs were intended to be rotated every six months and have included diverse selections including North American poets born before 1990; Native American poets; Oregon place names; Northwestern poets; European poets and many more. Jellum, wanted to create opportunities for moments of reflection within the urban landscape.

Longtime readers may recall seeing some other Jellum pieces here a few months ago, namely Transcendence (the fish-smashing-through-a-building thingy near the South Park Blocks) and Portal (the double hammer archway on 1st Avenue south of I-405). I liked both of those, and I've always liked Electronic Poet. But then, I tend to enjoy odd conceptual stuff like this, and your mileage may vary.

It didn't occur to me to make a video of Electronic Poet doing its thing; I just took still photos and called it a day, because that's what I always do. You're in luck this time, though, because someone recorded a full 10 minute Electronic Poet program and posted it on YouTube. That probably gets the idea across better than any photo I could take of it. While watching the clip, it occurred to me that there's something sort of archaic about the piece. It was created way back in 1984, when programmable red LED displays were still kind of new and exotic. Now it seems a bit quaint, sort of like a giant analog cell phone or a dual-cassette boombox with graphic equalizer sliders. I'm not saying change it; it's kind of charming and retro the way it is now, which is probably something they completely didn't anticipate back in 1984. Meanwhile, my neighborhood 7-11 convenience store has a full-color reader board that displays random stuff from Twitter, I suppose just to create a sense that they understand social media and the concerns of today's youth, that sort of thing. And someday people will sneer at that as a weird relic of the days before Holographic Smell-o-Vision was invented. Or something.

Transcendence

Couple of photos of Transcendence, the salmon-smashing-through-a-building sculpture above the Southpark restaurant at SW Salmon & Park Ave. It's been around for years (and was there when the B. Moloch restaurant occupied the space), but I didn't realize it had a name or counted as Art until just recently; turns out it's by the same artist who did Portal (the arch made of a pair of large hammers) on 1st Ave. just south of downtown. His website has a better photo of Transcendence. It also shows up in a blog post at Travel for Aircraft, and in Flickr & Facebook photos beyond number (here are just 3 of them: [1] [2] [3] that I thought were decent).

While searching for info for this post, I ran across a Stumptown Stumper at the Tribune about yet another piece by the same guy, something called "Mimir" on NW 27th between Thurman & Upshur, near Macleay Park, described as "a combination of Norse mythology, gibberish, fish and space creature". Pretty sure I'm going to need to track it down now and take a few photos. Discovering new topics like this may be the very best part of this entire blogging racket.

Portal

Couple of photos of a small sculpture called "Portal", which sits in front of a construction company office on 1st Avenue a few blocks south of I-405. I like the hammers-forming-an-archway concept. Some people might call it silly, but I think it works, and it fits where it's at. That isn't something I say a lot, or at least I haven't said it very much recently that I can recall.

If you're curious, the sculptor's website has some photos of other works of his here.