Time is up...

The warm weather is here for a while and the foliage is as green and abundant as can be. All around us are these amazing and diverse shapes shadings us from the harsh UV rays cascading down upon us. I have decided for my next series of projects to give people a little poke conveyed through the medium of the leaf.

I gathered the kids and told them the idea of writing messages in leaves and dropping them in areas around town to see what kind of reaction we could get out of people. They loved it and once we started down the road of making the message a little scary or looming they were beaming with the idea that we might be able to freak someone out with a leaf.

We started our search for large leaves that would give us enough room to laser out a few words each. We ended up with some grape leaves and some catalpa leaves which both proved to work very well after some testing. I found out that the leaves reacted very diversely depending on the speed and temperature at which the laser was set to cut.

The message we wanted to get across was that something in nature was not happy or that it was on the verge of fighting back. Small ominous messages that said something was on the horizon. We even did one that just had a series of geometric shapes that looked like it was some form of hieroglyphic.

This series of projects has been the most successful as of yet for eliciting response. These projects took place all over town and the greenbelt. I would try to find a place that had a decent amount of traffic and we would set out a leaf set back and try to blend with the background while we watched reactions. The kids had a very hard time containing themselves while we watched people come along each placement.

It seemed that kids were more likely to notice the leaf then an adult however we did get plenty of reactions from the older folks. Children would point them out to the adult and then they would bend down for further inspection. Some people would pick them up looking puzzled others would react much more excitedly. One family on the green belt almost caused a pile up as the father pulling a trailer with his wife and four other kids following closely behind slammed on his brakes upon site of the leaf. Everyone had to do what they could not to crash in the back of dad while he picked up the leaf. After a few minutes of excited discussion they put the leaf in their back pack and rode away.

Downtown placements were also popular. We would put the leaf near some sort of point of interest and wait to see who was observing their surroundings. This is where I got the best reaction to the project so far. After finding the leaf someone decided to take the time and make a message out of it for others to see. This person took one of the leaves that had the message time is up and attached it to the crosswalk sign at an intersection. It was great to see it up there with the message while the time counted down for the crosswalk.

This project had multiple messages spread over ten locations. If I have time we will do another series with a new theme before the project is complete.

Fake...

A few years back now our parks and recreation department decided to try and do something about the overabundance of geese in our parks. I don’t know for sure what it is that prompted the actions they took but it most likely is attributed to the amount of droppings left in the areas where the geese graze. I like most people I hope love the sight of our annual visitors but I do agree that they can leave quite a mess in the areas where they congregate the most. However I would gladly put up with the mess to enjoy the sight each year.

The dispersal method that parks and rec decided to use is basically a scare tactic. Use the bird’s natural instinct to fly away from a predator. So they cut out plywood silhouettes of wolves /coyotes or some sort of dog like animal on the prowl and disperse them around the open areas of the park where the geese like to feed. The funny thing is that when the black dogs first started showing up I don’t think it did a whole lot to change the way the geese behaved. However it did scare the you know what out of me a few foggy mornings as a rode through Ann Morrison Park on my way to work. Eventually my natural instinct was subdue and they just became part of the landscape after the first few weeks. I’m sure this was the case for the geese after the dogs failed to attack the first day.

Now after a few years we have hundreds of beat up silhouettes some missing legs most with bashed in backs from being spiked in to the turf year after year all scattered throughout the park system faded in to the background going unnoticed to me and all our seasonal visitors. I decided for this project to bring a little attention back to these poor forgotten plywood cut outs.

I decided I needed to make some plywood cut outs of my own something that might get people to take notice of the wooden wolves again. For the first project of this series I decided it was time to domesticate these wild beasts. I cut out a full size figure one that could leash one of these dogs and take it for a walk. I made a full size pattern of a figure with his hand extended out to hold a leash. Cut the shape out of some reclaimed plywood and used some left over paint we had lying around the shop to give it an even coat of silhouette black. I attached a steel rod to the back of his leg that could be pounded in to the frozen ground. By the way it is mid-winter when this project was done and the high for the day is 21 degrees. I drove through the park and found a suitable candidate to be leashed.

It is a very cold day and besides the very hard frozen ground the install was fairly fast. We decided to sit back and see how people would take notice. I’d like to say that lots of people came by and took a good hard look. But being such a cold day the park was not the most popular place to recreate. We had a few people drive by in their cars and a few did stop to take a prolonged look. Most were focused on the goal of getting to their destination and staying as warm as possible. I decided to leave the project up for a few days this time to see if the weather would warm up a bit so we could get a little more foot traffic. I came back a few days later to find that the plywood man and his leash were gone.

I will have a second project in the wooden wolf series that will take advantage of less harsh temperatures in the early fall when the dogs come back out to stand watch again.

Question what you are looking at always…

As I rode home this fall I came across this tree which had just lost all of its leaves. It was an amazing burst of color and it was as if someone flipped the switch off for whatever held all those leaves to the tree. One day they were all on the tree and the next there was a perfect bright yellow blanket below it. I decided this would be a great place for my first project.

That night I penciled out a few concepts I had been thinking about all evening and went back to visit the tree to see if the idea I liked would work. I knew that this would be a time sensitive project if the wind decided to pick up my perfect sea of yellow would be scattered across the park. I did my test and it worked out just as well as I hoped. The next thing I had to decide was what I was going say. Look which is the name of this project would have been fine but not what I was wanting. Yellow would have stated the obvious but seemed kind of boring. I decided I wanted to make people not just notice a word in the leaves but question it and ponder why someone would choose to write red in this large blanket of yellow. Now I know exactly what I want to say and do.

I drew up some plans for the word to be seen from quite a distance away I want it to make a real impact on the viewer not just in the fact it is an oddity seeing letter forms in the leaves but in the size they were written as well. I scaled my letters out at 8ft tall and 4ft wide. This size seemed large enough paper but when I got on site that morning I figured out it was about half the size I needed to have the impact I wanted.

We all got out on site early the next day and began to clear away the leaves revealing the very dark green grass that lay below it was a very nice contrast. I would lay out each stroke and the kids would help me clear the leaves. We would take the discarded leaves and rebroadcast them out across the rest of the yellow so it looked as nothing else was disturbed. After about 3 hours the project was complete.

My wife took the kids home and I stayed to watch how people would react as they passed by. I was pretty amazed really in the level to which people don’t take their eyes off the path they are walking, jogging or riding. I had a few people who would glance and then take a second hard look but keep moving along without missing a stride. Most people just kept their head down never looking up to make sure the sky is still in the place it is supposed to be. I did have 2 groups of people over the course of the afternoon actually stop and walk over to take a closer look. One group decided they needed to take some pictures to share with their friends. It will be interesting over the course of this project to see what it is that will make people look at what is going on around them.

This is what it's all about

I like to spin around our great city and take in all the sites grand and small. I have noticed over the last few years that people are traversing our pathways with blinders on to the world around them, ipods in their ears looking directly forward as if in a trance. You can nod as you pass, raise your hand and wave and maybe one out of ten people will acknowledge you. There are so many amazing things happening around us and it seems as if most people have switched off. I don't know the cause. I imagine that it's just content overload. Computers, 250 channels of TV, Satellite Radio, itunes, text messaging - the list goes on and on.

I want to find a way to pull people's attention away from all the made-up content in the world and remind them of what an amazing place the environment they live in really is. From the foothills in their backyard to the army of ants crossing the sidewalk at their feet or a new sapling rising out of the ground just off the green belt. I want to remind people that the acres and acres of green grass in our parks is a great place to lie down and just take a nap.

I propose to call people's attention in the most literal way: signs. Bold signs in settings that people are not used to seeing them. Large arrows with impossible to ignore text that points out a bird nesting in the tree above them. Or large dimensional letters that say PLAY HERE in an open field or pointing out discarded trash along the riverbank. There are a thousand different things that could use a new call to attention.

I plan to make no less than twenty unique calls to people's attention over the next 12 months. Each sign will be displayed in and around the downtown area. All signs will be made with 95% found and reused materials crafted into professional looking signs at Trademark Sign Company. Look! will be a family project that my children, Brooke, age 6 and Jack, age 10, are very excited to participate in. The project will be documented through photography and video with spectator reactions and comments uploaded to a Web blog after each event.

I'm excited at the possibilities for a project like this to take people if only for a few moments out of their media saturated worlds and remind them of this special and fragile environment we call home.