Honoring the Pearl’s Artistic Heritage
At Heartline, you’ll be surrounded by art at every turn. Our vibrant arts program is centered on our courtyard, where it is shared with the neighborhood. With landscape design inspired by logjam patterns, this public space offers an innovative sound and visual art program that honors the natural beauty of Oregon forests, the history of the Pearl District, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art, formerly located on this site. Click here for a video about Heartline’s art program.
A Forest and a Tree
Oregon is defined in the popular imagination by the towering forests of the state tree, the Douglas Fir. The greatest among these are impossible to comprehend in their scale, spatial complexity and bewildering form. This artwork captures these Oregon forest giants using laser 3d scans (LiDAR). The images are then isolated to depict individual specimens and etched using another laser tool into solid blocks of crystal. An adjacent large-format charcoal drawing intermixes this digital scan data with analogue drawing techniques to present an illustrated view of a single tree. Media: Seven laser-etched crystal blocks in a 24′ long x 2′ tall glass architectural vitrine, and a 3′ wide x 7′ tall charcoal drawing on panel.
Our Past was Writ in Water
This sculpture is designed as a welcoming and iconic beacon on the exterior of Heartline. The segments stand-off the wall and appear to mimic or shadow the pattern of the board formed concrete wall behind it. They include a nod to the past of the Pearl District with the inclusion of lit glass sections which visually represent the historical sidewalk materials and patterns found in the area. Cobblestones, concrete, asphalt, trolley rails—these materials were visually present in the worn and potholed street when this artwork was created. The work is a reminder of the past as the district continues to change. Media: Steel, aluminum, glass, 16’6″ tall x 14′ wide.
Emplace
Using directional speakers, audio is projected upwards into the courtyard, creating “sound portals”, which users can walk in to and out of. Drawing from the courtyard’s logjam design, each portal projects a mixture of nature recordings and musical tonalities. The result is an abstracted acoustic cinema — transporting the listener away from the site while simultaneously positioning them within the physical immediacy of their environment. Media: Ultrasonic speakers, electronics, metal grill, concrete. Three speaker boxes, approximately 2′-0″ wide x 2′-0″ long x 1′-1″ deep.
Make Our Garden Grow
The salvaged timber of the benches embodies our time and place, human interventions past and present. The words of the poem, Make Our Garden Grow by Richard Wilbur from Leonard Bernstein’s operetta Candide, are carved into timbers and etched in Morse Code on glass panels illuminated with pulsing LED lights. The benches lend to the mystery of coding and decoding, the complexity of our time. Media: Four mixed-media benches with LED lights, sandblasted laminated glass panels, aluminum channels, salvaged timbers.
