Taking advantage of a beautiful spring day (and an upcoming deadline), I took my temporary site art installation, Fence/Curtain 1.0, down at the ConstellationCenter in Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA, where it's been on exhibit since October 2011.
There's construction in the area, and I had to get unexpected on-location permission from a police detail because the area was blocked off because a huge crane was scheduled to do something crane-like. The officers were extremely kind and granted permission to enter the danger zone. They asked me how long it would take and I guessed at one hour, which turned out to be pretty close, thanks to some help from fellow artist and friend, Jodi Colella.
Armed with our scissors and small paper shopping bags on our arms, we carefully snipped quite a few hundred cable ties of assorted sizes and put them in our bags, so as to not litter.
It did take some patience to take the piece down. Some of the cable ties were hard to get access to and/or hard to cut. Besides the fact that they were holding it in place, I definitely think the cable ties were also a theft deterrent, not that there would have been a problem in Kendall Square. When I last exhibited a piece out of doors (other than in my own yard), it had 6 or 8 cable ties and someone walked away with it. It would have been a lot of work to walk away with this one. We were able to remove it in a little over an hour because I knew how it was attached to the fence. It would have been a lot harder for someone other than me to figure it out. Thank goodness.
As the four sections came down, I folded them up and piled them one on top of the other. When Jodi and I are going to pack up the car, I put the pile of fabric in a yellow Ikea bag to make it easier to carry. I LOVE working with fabric! There are not too many sculptors or installation artists who can fold their work up, put it in a bag, pack up the car, and drive back to their studios with such ease.
