Wing Dam 2021
Wing Dam. Anderson Center Sculpture Garden, Anderson Center for the Arts, Red Wing, MN. 2021. Native Dolomite Limestone, cement base, rebar, threaded steel rod. 5.5 ft. x 9 ft. x 32 ft. Site appx. 40ft. wide x 100 ft. long. Overall stone weight appx 20 tons.
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.
With site-specific and material variance, the modular Dolomite limestone contours, placed on rhythmic cement bases aligned solely with a single string, advance an array of artistic, spatial, and philosophical questions: When does the sculptural object become the land/earth and land/earth become the sculpture? What is the role of human motion in viewing the illusionary spatiality of repetitive mass and forms in open spaces? With geological time as material component of the limestone, how does space(s) and spatiality inhibit or condition our (sub)conscious mind?
With the river bluff location of the Wing Dam installation, I have intersected natural, sculptural, and architectural spaces, and the liminal voids where space is not segregated from the sculptural form. As the tactility of light is a revelatory force that reveals, we begin to see the Wing Dam stones as simple, yet complex. Through the language of abstraction, the site-specific stoneworks generate a three-dimensional vocabulary via angular wedge forms, gently nestled within the rural curving river bluff, and in connection with our Mother Earth as the blank canvas.
Pete Driessen credits the Anderson Center, MN State Arts Board, Wings Foundation, and others for their financial support of this site-specific project.