For the last several weeks it has been hard not to notice an advertising billboard campaign around Portland advertising Alaska Airline's new service from PDX to St. Louis. The new ads feature The St. Louis Arch designed by Architect Eero Saarinen. In my opinion it is one of the most beautiful objects on the planet, an icon of modernism.
The billboards, large prints, somehow portray this masterpiece in a way that really shows the scale of it. It's 630 feet tall. The space needle could fit under it!
The billboard image as advertising is effective in communicating a connection between Portland and St. Louis but also how it weaves the advertising verbiage around the image of the arch. This is something I am constantly trying to do in my own artwork. If you look closely at my images you see a kind of framework in the 'Tensility' series on which shapes and colors come and go. Some people have said it looks like an ancient native American wood frame of some sort and alludes to an animal hide. On closer inspection it is actually a work of modern architecture a kind of exoskeleton. The way it is stretch on to any given format there is an immediate illusion of the bending of space. I some works the space appears to be retreating and in others it comes forward. Thus we have a push/pull situation set up for whatever I choose to hang on it. Sometimes what I hang is bits of photography, other times it's my previous artworks. The feeling I get from this process is that I am creating a kind of cinema. Other times it's samplings of other artworks that I love for one reason or another. Yet in the making of this framework I am constantly aware of an engineering term called a Catenary. My understanding is that it is a natural draping of the line between two points and the curve varies depending on the length of the line and the distance between the points. The St. Louis Arch or Gateway Arch is basically an upside down catenary situation.
As a sixth generation Oregonian I can also relate to this monument to the westward expansion of the United States as I had relatives who came across on the Oregon Trail. So, when I look at the arch I somehow imagine that at one end is St. Louis and the other is Portland and the end of that trail.
I like the way the verbiage is weaved in amongst the arch and the arch's connection with Portland and it's pioneer story.
Billboard in downtown Portland