Mithun, Threshold Gallery, 2012
Phinney Park, 2013
Marking Place is the third in a series of collaborative works by Susan Gans and David Traylor to explore ideas that refer to landscape and place. The format for this exhibition reverts back to a multimedia approach including guest artists, Clint Ceder and Yun Hong Chang, as part of the project team.
This work involves both serious reflection and play on the ways the urban environment is viewed and the decisions made to protect or restore it. And it poses the question about the process assumed to create livable and well designed spaces. Susan’s photographic images look at sites in the cycle of change while the small scale marker created by David and Clint Ceder (shown in the montage poster created by Susan) became a ” surveyor’s rod “ to measure actual changes witnessed from earlier restoration or rebuilding of sites that have become iconic symbols in Seattle.
The design of larger scale sculpture that “marks” this pier on Seattle’s waterfront, as well as the smaller scaled surveyor’s rod, was inspired by the markings of plot maps and surveyor’s tools as well as the “Dazzle Ships” of World War One. Dazzle Ships were military and commercial vessels painted in almost cubist patterns and colors in order to confuse enemy submarines trying to calculate the proper trajectory of torpedoes. For this project, it provided an opportunity to play with the interaction of disparate materials like ceramics, nails, fur and photography. Thus, the making of the sculptural marker is imagination run wild, some humor and a bit of fantasy about the original “Dazzle Ships” in terms of its design. David and Clint created this larger than life marker. The images done by Susan of the small marker at city sites provide context and are the filmstrips on the sculpture. Yun is a ceramicist who works mostly in porcelain. Her view is the human scale and thus the boxes she created sit like houses perched on limbs looking in and out on the changes on both the land and the space beyond.
This work involves both serious reflection and play on the ways the urban environment is viewed and the decisions made to protect or restore it. And it poses the question about the process assumed to create livable and well designed spaces. Susan’s photographic images look at sites in the cycle of change while the small scale marker created by David and Clint Ceder (shown in the montage poster created by Susan) became a ” surveyor’s rod “ to measure actual changes witnessed from earlier restoration or rebuilding of sites that have become iconic symbols in Seattle.
The design of larger scale sculpture that “marks” this pier on Seattle’s waterfront, as well as the smaller scaled surveyor’s rod, was inspired by the markings of plot maps and surveyor’s tools as well as the “Dazzle Ships” of World War One. Dazzle Ships were military and commercial vessels painted in almost cubist patterns and colors in order to confuse enemy submarines trying to calculate the proper trajectory of torpedoes. For this project, it provided an opportunity to play with the interaction of disparate materials like ceramics, nails, fur and photography. Thus, the making of the sculptural marker is imagination run wild, some humor and a bit of fantasy about the original “Dazzle Ships” in terms of its design. David and Clint created this larger than life marker. The images done by Susan of the small marker at city sites provide context and are the filmstrips on the sculpture. Yun is a ceramicist who works mostly in porcelain. Her view is the human scale and thus the boxes she created sit like houses perched on limbs looking in and out on the changes on both the land and the space beyond.