Energy Dissipation Machine

Title: Energy Dissipation Machine
LC Subject: Sculpture Granite Stone carving Outdoor sculpture outdoor sculpture public sculpture sculpture (visual work) basalt (basic igneous rock)
Creator: Goldbloom, Brian
Description: A black and white photograph providing a view of the rock sculpture. The Oregon Arts Commission has ten Regional Arts Councils that provide delivery of art services and information. The Council for this location is: Oregon Coast Council for the Arts. You may view their website at: http://www.coastarts.org/
Location: Oregon Institute of Marine Biology >> Coos County >> Oregon >> United States
Street Address: 63466 Boat Basin Road, Charleston Oregon
Date: 1975/2012
Identifier: 2000_uo_marine-bio-instit_01_a01
Accession Number: 2000_uo_marine-bio-instit_01_a01
Rights: In Copyright
Dc Rights Holder: Goldbloom, Brian
Type: Image
Format: image/tiff
Material: two carved granite slabs were set "dry" on machined mating surfaces cut into the tops of four basalt boulders. Each of the basalt stones was set in sand and settled firmly into place with water. Two basalt stones support each of the two ganite slabs, one boulder under each edn. Sculpture granite; sculpture carved into two slabs using hand hammer and chisel, pneumatic hammer and chisel/busing tools and industrial diamond saws and grinders
Set: Oregon Percent for Art
Primary Set: Oregon Percent for Art
Relation: 2000 University of Oregon Marine Biology Institute 2000_uo_marine-bio-instit
Has Version: photograph; black and white; documents
Institution: Oregon Arts Commission University of Oregon
Note: OIMB History (http://www.uoregon.edu/~oimb/) University of Oregon has been teaching and conducting research in marine biology on the southern Oregon coast since 1924, when summer classes traveled to nearby Sunset Bay and used tents for dormitories and laboratories. In 1928-29, a portion of the Coos Head Military Reservation was selected as the permanent site for the University's marine program and in 1931 over 100 acres of the Reservation, including some Army Corps of Engineers buildings, was deeded to University of Oregon. These buildings became the first permanent classrooms, laboratories and dormitories. In 1937, the Oregon State System of Higher Education shifted stewardship of OIMB to Oregon State University (then Oregon State College) until the Second World War, when the site was reclaimed by the federal government for strategic purposes. After the war, OIMB was returned, first to Oregon State College, then in 1955 to the University of Oregon. Until the mid-1960's, the facility served as a summer field station. In 1966, the University undertook a two-year program of extensive building repairs and began using the marine station as a permanent, year-round research facility. A few years later, year-round educational programs were added to the existing summer teaching program. These teaching programs, as well as the research mission, continue to the present day. In 1985, OIMB added new teaching laboratories, research facilities and dormitories with a major grant from the federal government. In 1999, OIMB celebrated the construction of two additional research laboratories as well as the Loyd and Dorothy Rippey Library. An additional program of building renovation is currently in progress. The sculpture is located within a grouping ot 23 basalt stones that are place in three planting beds in front of the main entrance to the Rippey Library. The two carved slabs are located in the central planting bed directly in front of the entrance doors and rest upon four of the basalt stones. The central axis of the piece runs in a roughly northwest to southwest direction.
Color Space: RGB
Biographical Information: As is my working habit, I started this project with a period of preliminary research. Although I grew up in the Coos Bay area and assumed that somehow I had an insider's knowledge of the place (based on osmosis, I guess), the research was to prove my assumption false. What my reading and conversations revealed was that there was a critical aspect of my boyhood environment that I had entirely overlooked in favor of the seemingly more glamorous realms of tide pools, fish and marine mammals. This new discovery was - the wonderful world of mud. I had never paid much attention to estuaries with their mudflats and salt marshes. If I thought about them at all, It was in terms of wasteland and ugliness. Of course all that changed 180 degrees when I found that, contrary to my unthinking assumptions, these were amongst the most biologically productive places on the planet, not to mention being critically necessary "energy dissipation machines". Simply put, I discovered both functional and visual beauty in a place I had never suspected. The carved portion of the project is largely an impression that is based on this revelation and its implications. The sculpture's composition is multi-leveled, bringing into play a number of aspects of the project's larger context. For example, the ragged connection of the piece's two granite slabs references the fact that a geologic fault runs down the center of nearby South Slough, forming the surrounding geography. Carvings on the top surfaces of the granite allude to healthy estuarine environments. Contrasted against this is a single oversimplified channel, such as humans tend to create for their own purposes, and in the process trading a finely tuned natural machine, that works for a wide range of lifeforms, for a solution that, ironically, sabotages even themselves. A geometric square in the center of the carvings reflects the form of the adjacent small boat basin. The two focal granite slabs rest upon a cluster of boulders, as though tossed there like driftwood by the surf The arrangement of boulders hints at a watercourse running in the same direction as the channels carved in the granite, and on a path toward joining the stream running through the campus. (Goldbloom, 2000)