This is a site-specific piece. Vernon Boulevard is a heavily industrialized area. The scale and function of the surroundings define a specific industrial landscape and the presence of DiSuvero’s work only reinforces this aesthetic. What is unique about this sort of industrial landscape is the way that occupants have come to reclaim space in the presence of these surroundings. A local vernacular of small hand-made structures exists within the context of industrial surroundings. Unlike the intricately engineered factories, these structures are as much informed by the tools and materials at hand as by any formal or functional criteria. This is a really basic idea. These low-technology alterations to the industrial landscape exist everywhere. They are accessible, because this aesthetic is genuinely re-creatable; working within the limitations of available tools and salvageable materials, anyone can authentically work within that mode. An interest in the surrounding aesthetic and a basic understanding of how things fit together, rather than a specific plan, guide the building process. The construction is not prescribed, but rather informed by its own process. The result is large, but unobtrusive within the context. It is authentic. It looks like it has always been there; and it is only upon entering that you realize that, perhaps, it has not.

In a 1973 article on Frederick Law Olmstead’s plan for Central Park, Robert Smithson comments briefly on the expansion of the Metropolitan Museum under construction at the time. A photograph shows a large pit with a temporary shed erected on its periphery. Through the course of the construction, this shed and an adjacent wall became the object of public protest with slogans like, “Concrete and Trees Do Not Mix,” “Let’s not turn Central Park into an Asphalt Jungle,” “Decentralize the Met” and “Save the Park” spray-painted on its plywood exterior. Obviously, in the case of Central Park, any notion of authenticity is relative. The entire park is a fabrication, yet in Smithson’s photograph, the presence of this shed is apparent. It commands attention because it feels occupied—a site for supervision, meetings or coffee breaks. This is a way to begin thinking about a sculpture in a park.

The small blue shack in Michelangelo Antonioni’s, Red Desert, stands on the embankment of an inland shipping corridor. This is a way to think about making a sculpture on water.