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.