Wondrous Sculpture
Discovery Gateway atrium
Desert O
interactive art galleries
Picture Rocks Pool
The Iron Tarpon
Wondrous - a Sculpture for the Wheeler Taft Abbett, Sr. Public Library, Marana, AZ
This artpiece consists of a long, folded panel of galvanized steel and an intense light source that is active at night. The panel includes roughly 1000 words laid out in a way that encourages your eye to wander through it, creating new meanings from existing sources. We chose phrases from a wide range of literature, as well as oral histories of the settlement of the Marana area. The words are roughly 74% English, 24% Spanish, and 2% O'odham.
 
 
During the night, three of the world's most powerful LEDs (PhlatLightTM CBT 120 LEDs by Luminus Devices ) project intense color through the words, casting overlapping shadows in six colors on the landscape around the sculpture, the library wall, and visitors that pass by. While there are many ways to understand this phenomena, some purely aesthetic, one interpretation is that we are inevitably imprinted by the words and phrases of the written culture that has come before us. These words inscribe themselves upon us even before we are aware of what is happening. Yet, they strike each person differently and are always subject to rearrangement. One of our primary jobs and sources of pleasure as human beings is making sense of what came before us and leaving some of that behind. The library is a great place where that happens.