Begin Again Corner

The ongoing tour of Portland transit mall art takes us to Begin Again Corner, better known as the corner of SW 5th & Columbia. The piece consists of fern designs by Anne Storrs and a Kim Stafford poem inscribed onto one corner of the Fifth Avenue Building, a former state office building built in 1951. RACC describes the piece thusly:

The artist’s images of a sword fern’s from fiddlehead to skeletal form, are combined with Kim Stafford’s site specific poem about turning a corner. Eleven individual or groups of sword ferns are sandblasted into the building’s granite surface.

Beyond the design itself, which I rather like, the piece adds a bit of a street-level presence to what used to be another windowless, blind corner. I'll probably never understand why they thought that was a great design feature back in 1951.

Apollo 14

Couple of photos of the Apollo 14 command module Kitty Hawk, on display in a side gallery at the Apollo Saturn V Center at Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

Orange Lining: Art Starts Now

If you've seen any of the construction sites for Portland's upcoming Portland-Milwaukie Light Rail project, you may have noticed that the usual orange silt fencing has words stenciled all over it. Turns out this is a conceptual art project called Art Starts Now, the first phase of a larger project titled simply Orange Lining. Before construction began, local residents were invited to submit short blurbs of text for use in the project, and of the roughly 1100 submissions, 102 were selected for use in the project. You might think that, as a semi-obsessive Twitter user, I would have been a natural for this sort of contest, but I couldn't think of anything to enter. Based on the eventual selections, they seem to have been looking for something more poetic and upbeat than anything I likely would have submitted anyway. So, no biggie.

In any case, most of the selected lines will also end up in a more permanent form in phase two of Orange Lining, which they're calling simply Impressed Concrete. Which involves the lines being impressed into concrete sidewalks here and there along the new light rail line. I've seen a few of those around already, but I think I'll collect a few more before creating a post about them.

Grand Canyon (IV)

Grand Canyon (I)

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I assume the Grand Canyon needs no introduction. I think I'm going to spread the photos across several posts like I did with Yosemite, since a single post with 20+ photos gets to be a bit much. Enjoy!

Grand Canyon (III)

Grand Canyon (II)

spring, mojave desert

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A few photos from the John Wilkie Rest Area, on I-40 near Fenner, CA, in the middle of the Mojave Desert. These were taken in early springtime, and many of the desert plants were flowering at the time. It's hard to tell in these photos since I wasn't really equipped to take close up photos back then, but the scenery was pretty striking and I figured these were worth posting even if you can't really see the flowers very well.

At the time I took these, I didn't make a note about where I was, so that took a little detective work. I rememberd this was at a rest area along I-40 in California, east of Barstow, and it turns out there are only two of those, so I fired up Google Street View and compared scenery with my photos. So I'm pretty sure this is the Wilkie rest area and not the other one, which is just a few miles outside of Barstow. I'd stayed the night in Barstow, so I can't imagine I would have pulled off the highway to take photos so soon after hitting the road for the day.