Category: Public Art

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City Life Public Art

When your eyeballs explode in the vacuum of space

A child wearing a Toronto Blue Jays hat climbs on a sculpture of a Toronto Maple Leafs goalie with a sign that says: Please Do Not Climb On Sculpture
Sculpture in The Distillery District, Toronto

My son attacked me with a baseball bat the other day. Obviously I’m fine. Even so, it’s left me on edge.

My relationship with my son changed the minute he discovered that I’ve played bit roles in action flicks. When the robbers storm the bank, I’m the first guy they shoot in the head. When the platoon takes the hill, I’m the private who steps on a live grenade. And when the aliens attack the spaceship, I’m the astronaut whose eyeballs explode after he gets sucked into space without a helmet. Each time, I’m gone in the first big scene and the movie goes on without me for another hundred minutes.

Josh thinks it’s the coolest thing to watch his old man get destroyed a hundred different ways. So the other day he invites all his school friends over because they don’t believe him when he brags that his dad is indestructible. I walk in on a roomful of nine year olds and all they want to know is if I’m made of rubber or maybe titanium wrapped in latex, like in that movie, you know—what’s it called?—Sperminator? And they giggle.

I try to explain to them how the studio applies CG effects in post production, but their eyes wander and they start to squirm. They want to watch more clips of me getting my arms blown off. I try to explain that when I have that look on my face, it’s because I’m acting, not because a bullet is actually going into my head. I go: you know how you can send photos of yourself and the messaging app puts cat ears on your head? They all nod. Well it’s like that, only instead of cat ears, it’s high res blood. I hear the creak of gears turning inside their tiny little heads, but the gears don’t turn fast enough to make the connection between cat ears and exploding eyeballs.

I tell them I’ll go make some popcorn. Josh says he’ll put on the next scene. As I’m walking to the kitchen, I hear the familiar dialogue from a motion cap scene I did for GTA. I’m a loser who gets rear ended driving a Ford Pinto. I get out before the car blows up, but the thugs come at me with a baseball bat anyways. It occurs to me then that the kids are too young to be watching this scene, what with all the gratuitous violence and swearing. I’m sure I’ll get a call from somebody’s parent.

I come back to the TV room with a bowl of popcorn and Josh comes at me with a baseball bat.

He shouts: He’s made of rubber and I’ll prove it!

It’s amazing what happens to time when the adrenaline kicks in. I’ve noticed the same thing on movie sets. It’s like the frame rate jumps to ten thousand so you can slow things down and still keep your movements smooth and seamless. In that instant, I see how Josh’s face is contorted, not with malevolence, but simply with effort. Popcorn explodes like there’s a tiny grenade planted inside the bowl and the kernels seems to hang suspended in mid-air. A roomful of nine year old jaws gape in wonder as the rubber man executes a sideways twisting move and avoids the baseball bat.

I snatch the baseball bat from Josh’s hands and order him to his room. Then I tell the kids the party is over. Call your parents and have them pick you up. Nobody whines because they’re too busy going on about how Josh’s dad really is made of rubber. Did you see how he moved? Next time I come over, I’m bringing my dad’s gun; I bet Josh’s dad can dodge bullets.

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Public Art

Larry Sefton Memorial

Larry Sefton Memorial, by Jerome Markson

Typically, I avoid shooting a work of public art if all I’m doing is documenting its existence. That feels parasitic. I should leave the work alone to do whatever it’s supposed to do, whether that means interact with its environment or with the people who encounter it. But there are times when I feel drawn into conversation with a work, as I did when I approached this arrangement of girders by the architect Jerome Markson. There was something about the falling snow and the red wall behind it that lent it a something more. I met it in a fleeting moment that would vanish when the snow melted and the sun came out to cast shadows across the scene. There was a surplus in this moment.

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Public Art

Gallery Of Modern Art

Man smoking a cigarette walks past the Gallery Of Modern Art in Glasgow

Like most art galleries, museums, and historic sites in the UK, Glasgow’s Gallery Of Modern Art, GOMA, is free. When you walk through the front door to use the gallery’s washroom, you pass a statue of Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington, on horseback and wearing a traffic cone on his head. When the Italian artist, Carlo Marochetti, completed the sculpture in 1844, it didn’t include a traffic cone. Someone added that later and it has become an essential feature. Inspired by the quality of whimsy that GOMA fosters, I found art in the plastic chairs and folded tables on the sidewalk outside. A man in a hoodie and smoking a cigarette completed the image.

Night time in front of the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
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Public Art

Glasgow Botanic Gardens

Marble sculpture titled Eve, by Scipione Tadolini, in the Kibble Palace, Glasgow Botanic Gardens

The marble sculpture shown above is titled Eve, created by Scipione Tadolini in the 1870’s, and displayed beneath the glass roof of the Kibble Palace in Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens. Like all good Victorian nudes, this woman’s nether regions are discreetly hidden by greenery. Had Tadolini created this sculpture in the age of Instagram, he would have blotted out her nipples, too. Ah, we live in such times!

There is something sad today in art that aspires to realistic representation. In the case of Eve, that realism is not evident in her pose, but in her anatomy. I feel the same sadness in my photography when I try, sometimes obsessively, to capture the world as it is. This desperate documentation. I feel it, too, in the glass dome of the botanical gardens whose purpose is to cultivate interesting, rare, even endangered plant species. Botanists document plant life. Expand its taxonomy. Rush to produce a complete catalogue before it’s all gone.

I imagine an alien ship touching down on the grounds of the Glasgow Botanic Gardens in a post-human world. Maybe the lawn is scorched. They step inside the Kibble Palace, panes of glass shattered here and there. All that remains of the plants are woody stalks. The leaves have fallen to the floor and are turned to dust. In the middle of the desolation sits a white marble form with unseeing eyes and unfeeling skin. This is all that remains of the human species. That and a few photos.

The Kibble Palace at Glasgow Botanic Gardens
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Public Art

The Harpy Celaeno

The Harpy Celaeno, marble sculpture by Mary Pownall

The Harpy Celaeno (1902) is a marble sculpture by Mary Pownall that stands in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum. You can read a full description of the work on the ArtUK web site. In mythology, harpies were half human half birds who personified storm winds. Mary Pownall served as the model for her own work.

Each time I visit, I make a point of viewing the sculpture from the second floor gallery because, in the manner of a true street photographer, I look for chance encounters. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I can get a shot that looks as if the harpy is pouncing on a passerby. To date, I haven’t got a shot that satisfies me, but I’m working on it.

Marble Sculpture by Mary Pownall