A Scholars Rock Cut In Half To Reveal A Map Of Lake Ontario - Part 2
Transcript
Once I had the idea for the work, it started with the shape of Lake Ontario. How do you squeeze the shape of Lake Ontario into a sculpture? And then I even had it, Lake Ontario, initially sideways which is how we normally look at it. Because you think of the polar ice cap as north and Antarctica as south and so on. But then I realized that that would make the work incredibly wide. And so that wasn't possible given the footprint. So I turned it on its side. And from space it doesn't really matter. If you're in a space ship like these astronauts they fly at different angles and you'll see North America from a totally different perspective. Right? And not necessarily the way we like to look at it in terms of a map. So it's just a purely arbitrary way we've conceived of how we've visualized the world.
And so, here I am standing in front of the let's just say lumpy side of the work. It's the lumpyness of it which is unpredictable. It's the lumpyness of it which calls up meditation, the meaning of the universe. Because it's irregular, it's not something that's easily patterned. And it's full of changes as you walk from left to right or further back or up close. The perspectives on it change, the shapes on it change. The shapes, the nubs on it star to surprise . You start realizing that some of the nubs may be smaller than you think as you get closer. And then some of them disappear and some of them get bigger as you get closer or further back. And so that's the functioning of the gnarly side you see is the unpredictability of the surfaces.