Pathways–that’s for Rochester Community and Technical College, Rochester, Minnesota. It’s an outdoor sculpture and it’s very simple. It is 70 pieces of steel because they have 70 academic programs. And they have what they call academic pathways, which are ways to navigate, to get your degree, but they could overlap, combining different choices or ways to get through the programs.  So to reflect those 10 pathways, I chose 10 colors.

So there are 70 pieces of steel, each one’s unique, and there are 10 colors amongst those 70 pieces.  There are vertical pieces and horizontal pieces and it looks like a 3-dimensional scaffold kind of thing. 

It’s very precise because each piece is different, and it overlaps other pieces that are different lengths, different directions, different orientations, and they’re connected with bolts where they overlap.  So those holes have to line up exactly.  And there can be no mistakes.  So it was very tricky to draw. If you start thinking about it at all, you then start to see how complicated it is.

They’re all right angles, so they’re either going in the X direction, the Y direction, or the Z.  But imagine, though, these 70 pieces– they have four faces.  They’re all different.  So they all need to be named, and the name–just identifying the part–even that is complicated because you can’t just write “X12” on a piece, because it’s getting painted, which means it gets sandblasted first, so there goes the marker, and then it gets painted.  So we are actually stamping both ends of the piece with the identifying number, which will be a permanent part of the piece.

And there are multiple pieces that attach to one, so the other issue is when dimensions are in a line, there could be a little error, and it could keep adding up, and that might throw everything off, I don’t know.  So I’m a little scared about it.

Normally, I do make mistakes, because it’s just me working.  But that costs money and time and it’s really stressful.  So I have had an independent person take what I drew after I’ve checked it three times and then recheck it and start building it on the computer, digitally, just to make sure it fits, that the dimensions are okay.

And then the steel fabricator sends me drawings–they take my drawings, they make their own drawings, and then I look at their drawings and I compare them to my drawings to make sure that they haven’t made any mistakes, that their drawing matches.  And I’ve found errors, which frightened me.  So I’m hoping that it all works out, because really, if there’s even one bolt hole that’s off, depending how it’s off, the piece could be ruined.  If the piece is ruined, then I have to make another piece–I have to have it fabricated and I have to have it painted and I have to bring it out there and it’s a lot of time and some money.  So it’s kind of interesting to see how it’ll all work.

The installation will be later this month. I’m saying 3 days. I think the way we’re going to do it–it may be three people total, including me, but it may just be me and another guy I’ve worked with, Dave Manthei, who’s a great guy.  He helped install Collection Point too, so this should not be the epic installation that was.  Ultimately I hope it’s fun–it’s like putting a kit together, or a Lego set or something.  But I think we have it figured out.

It’s a tricky thing to think about building too because you can’t just say oh, I’ll just go bolt these things together.  It has to go together in a precise order because the more dense it gets, the more difficult it gets to access, right?  The other thing is there are about 17 vertical steel pieces that are anchored onto the concrete slab.  But if we bolt a piece to the concrete, then there it is, right?  And we may discover as we fit more together that that one needs to move, so the idea is to get it standing without bolting it. Maybe just prop one up.  Once you get about three of these things together and they’re connected with horizontal pieces, it’ll just stand on its own.  And then we can make adjustments.  But basically we’ll have to dry fit the whole thing together, which means bolt it together but not tighten it down, and then go back and tighten everything once we know it fits.  And then probably, counter-intuitively, the last step will be bolting it to the concrete.  

So I’m actually making a grid that I laid out, that all these things are situated on.  Not just the vertical pieces that sit on the concrete, but everything falls on that grid, whether it’s a horizontal or up in the air–everything is on that grid.  I think I’m going to print out the grid full-scale.  It’s like 11 feet by 7 or 8 feet.  You can’t print that big, you can print 4 feet by whatever, so I’ll tape it together and we’ll put that grid down on the concrete foundation and then we’ll use that as the guide. 

Look for photos and an account of the actual installation in the next blog post. I haven’t done this for a while, and it’s exciting!

Pathways, public art, Rochester