Welcome to Pete’s new art website. New portfolio additions, exhibitions, documents, and updates are coming soon! Here is a brief artistic statement on my recent site-specific Wing Dam sculpture that was researched, developed, designed, and created over a period of a year in conjunction with my 2020 artist residency at the lovely Anderson Center for the Arts, Red Wing, Minnesota.
Wing Dam is an abstract, site-specific series of five locally resourced native Dolomite Limestone wedges installed as a staggered alignment of parallel chevrons, gently shifting in scale, reflecting the Cannon and Mississippi River confluence, revealing geologic time and geographic materiality, and illuminating ideas of spatial modularity, water flowage and navigation, and post-colonial and industrial river culture.
Gently aligned with the cardinal directions, the Wing Dam is sited in reverence honoring native burial mounds yet questions our human control of fresh water. A typical ‘wing dam’ is a rock structure used by the Army Corp of Engineers to direct flowage and navigation. Together, the sliced open grouping of wedge forms contrast with the flat land and abstractly evoke the contours and spirit of the convergence of the Cannon and Mississippi Rivers, located just over the bluff from the Anderson Sculpture Garden.
Megalithic in nature and character, the boulderesque stones jettison up from below the earth, much like how wing dam rocks suddenly arise from the flowing shallow river water as one passes by in a watercraft. The motion-based experience is one of linear elegance in design, yet stark in contrast to the natural river bluff landscape. The wedge structures create a unique repetitive illusionary appearance paralleling the scattered geological drift formations leftover on the midwestern escarpment from the Laurentian period, so abundant to the MN/WI lake and river regions.
Wing Dam is located within the beautiful Anderson Center for the Arts Sculpture Garden, found just north of downtown Red Wing, Minnesota on the Great River Road/State Highway 61. Open 24-7 during daylight hours. For further information at www.andersoncenter.org.