7 of 52 'SENTINEL'

'SENTINEL' (18L x 15W x 2 ½”D) week of September 28th

Back when I was in college I collaborated on a few art projects with my friend Hunter Caputo. It was my senior year and we had this class, which dealt with sculpture in a public arena. At the time I was taken with Jean Claude Christo and his monumental installations. One project we collaborated on was a massive cardboard wall where Hunter and I worked to procure the materials, permission and concept which yielded a 6’ high wall built from cardboard boxes measuring 36x24x36”. The location we chose for this installation was the PSU park blocks. A city block in Portland rounds out at 200’, which landed us at about 1000’ of cardboard double stacked. We stayed up for two days straight building the wall, repairing the wall and fielding questions and complaints. We started late on Sunday night and by first light Monday we finished construction. It was beautiful. Straight as an arrow and contoured to fit the slight rolling downhill, the installation glowed with the pail purple light of the early morning; giving it something more than the individual parts but charging the whole with character and presence. This memory is the treasure before our works eventual demise 24 hours later.

I remember people’s reactions being intense but remember one interaction in particular, which really set the impetuous for Sentinel. A professor approached me and asked if I was responsible for this mess. I told her I was and started telling her what the whole project was about. Before I got into my sentence she started laying into me with a ferocious spiel about how irresponsible I was and how I was the cause of global warming. I was pretty exhausted at this point and realized she would never accept any other point of view so I checked out. I watched how furious she looked with her red face and waving finger and BLA! BLA! BLA! which came from her all knowing mouth surrounded by ugly lipstick. What the hell am I talking about?

Sentinel is set inside a funky frame which I have no recollection of procuring. Composed mainly of MDF, laminates and hemlock.