Revealed is an exciting little project in Vancouver, Washington.  It’s for the Clark County Historical Museum, a small museum in Vancouver, Washington.  It’s housed in an old 1937 Carnegie Library that is now converted into the museum.  And they wanted a piece of outdoor sculpture. 

In their call for art, they mentioned something about their building having been built from local materials.  And I researched that a little bit, and these bricks that the building was built from were produced there in Vancouver.  The company was called the Hidden Brick Company.  The family name was Hidden.  And Lowell Hidden started this company, and a lot of prominent buildings in Vancouver were constructed from these Hidden bricks.  And there would be a brick in each building with the name “Hidden” imprinted on it.  So if you look carefully, you’d see a brick that says “Hidden.” 

And there was an article in one of the local papers, a piece done on the buildings that were built from these bricks, talking about how these bricks are not hidden… and I started thinking about this paradox of being hidden in plain sight, and how really, history is the same way.  You can walk around and you don’t know what you’re looking at maybe, you don’t know what the stories are, what the history is, but then the museum brings these stories to light.  They reveal them so that they’re not hidden.  They uncover them.

So I got really inspired by this idea and that’s about as far as I got, and wrote a letter of interest, and was selected as a finalist.  And basically, they said, you’ve been selected as a finalist but you should know that out of all the finalists selected–I think there were just three–your concept of revealing the hidden is the least clear, or least defined, and we don’t know what you’re really thinking, but we’re interested in what you might come up with.  And at that point I didn’t really know what I was thinking either, except that it had something to do with those bricks.  So, it was exciting to develop this concept. 

Basically, it’s taking a corner of the building, which had some architectural detail–this brick corner which is visible from the spot where the sculpture was to be placed–and reconstructing it as kind of a ruin, like it’s eroding–or maybe it’s being built– and then wondering what would happen if you removed the solid brick so that only the mortar space was showing.  And so the mortar is now steel, it’s quarter-inch, about the thickness of mortar.  It’s kind of this mesh-work where you’re seeing the inverse.  All you’re seeing is the mortar and there are no bricks.  And it was kind of an interesting effect, because as you move around this corner thing, you get transparency.  If you’re looking at it straight on, you can see right through it.  And then if you’re looking obliquely, it’s solid.  So that was very interesting too, and seemed to be site-specific, contextual.  Because what it’s hiding was actually the museum, the corner that it was duplicating.  It was revealing the building itself. 

So that’s what it is.  It’s not very big.  It’s maybe 11 or 12 feet tall, it’s a corner of the building, depicted just in mortar.  The main part of the structure is corten steel, so it’s a weathering steel.  It reaches an oxidation level, turns a rich kind of dark rust, and then it stops.  It’s probably the most permanent of sculpture materials.  But then there will be these panels of polished stainless steel that will be placed back within the mortar that will have words, and the words are still to be determined.  But the idea is that the museum staff will come up with those words.  Because part of the idea– this museum has become a more active, dynamic place.  It used to be just a small place where you’d go and visit and see the little displays and there it was–that’s the Clark County Historical Museum.  But now they’ve done outreach, they’re trying to treat it like a real, living place.  So there are community voices, there are stories that are being retold that haven’t been told before, and so these panels are an opportunity then to intrigue people about what’s inside that museum.  They can also be changed as well. 

It could be a year or two before it happens, but it’s a great project.

public art, Revealed, Vancouver