Tower 1998
wood, cable, acrylic mirror, sheet rubber,
steel, steel cable, paper, billboards, hardware
Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE
The “portable” tower is joined in a dry mortise and tenon fashion and held under tension with steel cable. The horizontal version portrays a situation somewhere between disaster and building experiment. The enormous weight of the shack and cantilevered tower is offset by a counterweight system of cable and massive paper rolls. Viewers are confronted with a dangerous sense of tension and weight. The structure is lightly balanced on a fulcrum.