Painted welded steel, 2004.
An outlook is the view from a window, a way of regarding things, and a weather forecast, and the sculpture is built to hold all three. A heavy beam rides on two unlike posts: a round column on a stepped disc and a flat blade ending in a curled foot. The form is a triumphal arch, and the opening under the beam is both a doorway and a window, a frame a visitor walks through and looks through at once. It was made for the grounds of a window and door manufacturer, whose products have the same two functions.
The forecast sits above the frame. At the left end of the upper mass a short round tube opens toward the viewer, and its circular end reads as a sun. A sloped plate overhangs the mass like a cloud. At the right, opposite the tube, a wedge narrows downward from beneath the plate toward the post below it. It reads as a funnel cloud hanging from its parent cloud. The sun and the tornado stand at opposite ends of the same upper mass, with the cloud plate over both.
A window and a door handle light and storm, which are what a building lets in and keeps out. The sculpture hangs the extremes of the weather at the two ends of the lintel and leaves the opening between them clear. A visitor walks under both and out the far side. The piece is built from slabs, cylinders and one flat blue, plain planes with no ornament, and the single color covers sun, cloud, funnel, beam and post alike.
