I have been working with James Brenner on a series of sculptures identifying the EDGE District in St. Petersburg, Florida!
BACKGROUND:
“Downtown St. Petersburg’s historic EDGE District is a global destination and ideal urban living place. Rooted in rich history of pioneering and industry, the district features restored buildings, landscaped corridors with majestic palms, public art, and eclectic shopping, dining, and cultural experiences. The district’s authentic, safe, and beautiful environment promotes a connected, active community.”
This project consists of multiple gateway markers utilizing one design. There will be two larger scale sculptures and six to eight of smaller scale spread through the district.
The designs incorporate sculpted jade green glass, Cor-ten weathering steel, LED lighting and stainless steel. These materials combine solidity with fluid mobility, shifting in mass and shape in response to the time of day and the viewer’s perspective. By day the steel has a warm natural finish and the sculpted glass plays with the light as it gleams through its hand chipped, jewel like texture. By night the illuminated glass elements create a dialogue of light and color. Through this dual sense of stability and motility, a transformative relationship between physical space and the diversity of individual reactions to that space is mirrored.
The City of White Bear Lake’s first public art commission, Aaron Marx and Jim Brenner’s Aerosail, references rich site history.
Forecast was hired by the City of White Bear Lake to guide its Public Art Selection Committee on the city’s first public art commission. They were seeking public art for a location at a unique intersection between public and private space. The site—where sailboats were built and designed in the early 1900s by John O. Johnson—was recently redeveloped as the BoatWorks Commons with both public and private spaces, including apartments, a restaurant, community space and a parking ramp.
Though other public artworks are present throughout White Bear Lake, none had been commissioned by the city. They thus turned to Forecast’s trusted and experienced consulting team to guide the process of RFQ creation and the application invitation of regional sculptors.
Public space was included as part of the BoatWorks Commons development arrangement, and the idea of a sculpture for the site grew out of interest in making the location special. Recognized for its potential impact on future public art in the community, the project aimed to create a welcoming environment, interest passersby, energize the waterfront, respect the intersection of nearby public and private spaces and reference the site history.
Artist Aaron Marx and sculptor Jim Brenner were selected to collaboratively create the public art piece for BoatWorks Commons. The site’s sailing history strongly informed the design and creation by Aaron Marx and Jim Brenner, who worked closely with the committee and were tasked with balancing an abstract and literal visual representation of sailing in a durable design. Aerosail—a sleek form of curving, connecting stainless steel—successfully enlivens and adds interest to the space, makes it welcoming and signifies openness to the community.
During the dedication ceremony, Aaron Marx said of his first collaboration with his colleague Jim Brenner, “This site was the Johnson Boatworks for more than 100 years, which was a big part of the inspiration for this project. We’re both interested in mathematics and the fluid dynamics of air spiraling as it comes off the sail. We were also inspired by the way they built their boats, and the curvature of the boat’s hull.”
Following its unveiling on May 16, 2018, White Bear Lake Mayor Jo Emerson said of the piece, “The sculpture belongs here. It fits. It’s just where it should be.”
Aerosail can be visited at:
Boatworks Commons
4495 Lake Ave. S
White Bear Lake, MN 55110
The evidence for climate change is overwhelming. One need not search far to find hundreds of examples of phenomenal weather and storm events in recent years alone. We have reached a singularity in human experience, a point where our environment is showing obvious signs of being impacted by human behavior. According to The Center for Biological Diversity, “we’re currently experiencing the worst spate of species die-offs since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.” Our consumption of natural resources is largely responsible. In society, much less in public space, we often fail to sustain conversations about the changing climate enough to even collectively construct basic approaches to adaption, let alone mitigate the conditions we are constantly exacerbating. Often, in a place like Minnesota, we let our private relief about a mild winter, or a reprieve from a predicted storm, suppress our willingness to continue to talk with others about the catastrophic potentials facing us. People are often afraid of where the conversation might go. In response to this, the Making the Best of It (MTBOI) project has embarked on a mission to engage diverse communities in a highly designed opportunity to discuss climate change and our need to eat nimbly.
A year-long series of site-specific pop up tastings and community dinners situated in response to this environmental chaos, MTBOI engages visitors with the risks of climate chaos, our business-as-usual food system, and the short term food innovations at our disposal through collaborations with artists, scientists, geographers, chiefs, and community groups. The first iteration of this project was developed for Northern Spark 2016, and made possible through the support of NorthernLights.MN and the University of Minnesota’s School of Architecture. In collaboration with Marina Zurkow, Valentine Cadieux, and Sarah Petersen, (along with a team of orators, chefs, and community guides) we served over 650 people pickled dandelion root, dandelion tincture, dandelion salad, and kimchee dandelion pancakes. To house these tastings, we designed and built three structures; fabricated to be light weight, mobile, and deployed with a team of two in a couple hours, these structures were used for an all night art event, and sited on historic ruins on the Mississippi River bluffs near Saint Anthony Main. The space was a place of repose in the midst of ten’s of thousands of people. The experience of MTBOI is best described as an outdoor free pop up restaurant, where visitors were guided through a series of structures and situations built around tasting dandelions in new and unexpected ways.
I have been working with James Brenner Sculpture on various projects. For this project we have designed and developed a corten steel, aluminum, and glass dragonfly to be installed in Austin Texas. All of this work is done in Rhino, constructed in 3d, deconstructed to be plasma cut. Here are some images of the work in progress.
Course Description:
This BDA workshop will explore memorialization and the potential of digital modeling in the architectural design process. Marcel Proust’s statement captures the power of memory on our perception of space and emphasizes the fact that human experience offers an abundant approach to the question of the nature of architecture and its role in the making of the world.
This workshop will ask students to create and represent digital models in relationship to a specific memory or event. Related to the idea of poetic analogy, students will explore how models can be used as a process of visualizing, thinking, and contemplating.
Looking to examples of memorials, real and imagined, students will be asked to speculate on the role of memory in architectural design, and select a memorial for research and study during the workshop. There will be a series of lessons on the basic concepts of digital modeling and rendering, and students will be expected to produce a model and represent it in relationship to memorialization.
Mass Information and the Temporal Graffiti of War:
A social media device, exploring of the ideology of Purple Hearts
A collaboration with Minneapolis Art on Wheels this project was an opportunity to influence society and culture in fantastic ways. Through major exposure to the masses this work sought to send an inspirational and motivational message about peace and understanding, while providing ‘real’ information to society. My experience with architecture, graffiti, computers, 3D modeling, rendering, and mathematics helped to develop social, technical, and artistic uses for advancing technology.
One primary goal was to develop software that searches for anti-war information and displays that information graphically, through projections, onto buildings and environments. Purple hearts were initial subject matter — exploring the secret counting and documentation of those injured and killed in the Iraq war. How is this medal connected to the Presidents, can we give the public an accurate idea of what it means to have a Purple Heart, and in doing so make apparent the realities of war? This software was intended to find a way to represent social questions through temporal, legal graffiti that is generated from real world data collection.
The goal of this project was to inform, educate, and inspire the communities in Minneapolis, MN. Although the images projected were not always analytically understood, their message was expressed with scale and motion. Some questions I asked were: What would the affect of six million beating hearts have, if projected onto a skyscraper near a highly traveled freeway? How could up-to-date, hard-to-find information be obtained and graphically displayed? What kind of time is inherent in this process, and are we capable of representing such information graphically?
New World Symphony – Digital Design and Fabrication
Working with Radius Track I helped to digitally fabricated light gauge framing for Frank Gehry’sNew World Symphony. Using Rhino, we deconstructed three-dimensional models and develop bending procedures and specifications for the construction and fabrication of complex multi-dimensional curved architectural surfaces. This project required extensive knowledge of geometry, material limits, and digital fabrication procedures.
Making the Best of It is a series of regionally site-specific food and art installations and community meals that feature a climate-change enabled (and often unwanted) edible species. People are engaged in tastings and conversation about the risks of climate chaos, our business-as-usual food system, and the short term food innovations at our disposal.
In Minnesota, Making the Best of It: Dandelion includes a team of orators, community guides, and food servers help participants explore climate change through dandelions!
This web zine provides examples of making the best of it, as our public participatory projects try to approach and question the ways in which food, behavior, and perception affect our relationships to climate change.