Soldered brass, 17 x 15 x 6, 2016.
The title names a sculpture park, an outdoor museum named for the mountain beside it, where monumental works stand against the landscape. This sculpture is small enough to carry by the handle on its top. It riffs on a steel sculpture 5.5 metres tall that was unveiled in Edmonton in 2004, so the monument comes first and the brass version is its portable echo. The joke is in the title’s scale: a mountain’s name on an object that goes in two hands, with the monument’s frontal authority intact.
Two supports carry a level bar, a slender column on a turned foot at the left and a heavy angled slab at the right. The unequal pair holds the bar and the box above it level, as a monument has to stand. A round opening faces front in the box, and below it a fluted shell hangs between the supports. From the front the opening and the shell make a face with a collar, composed and looking out at the viewer. That is the king, and it also supplies the “outlook” of the earlier work’s title.
The storm is at the right edge. A flared funnel stands at the top of the heavy slab, and a twisted rod winds down from it to a small cylinder at the foot, so funnel and spiral read as a whirlwind touching down. The slab that carries the bar is the same member the funnel and spiral run along. Authority and weather share one support, with the still column on the left and the disturbance on the right. The title’s two words divide between the two sides of the work.
