Starting sometime this summer, if all goes as planned, Mountain View residents may see themselves in a unique piece of public art. Steph Kese and Erin Pollock are asking to borrow the faces of people in the neighborhood to create an outdoor sculpture on the corner of Mountain View Drive and Commercial Boulevard.
You may have seen some of Kese and Pollock's faces before. They used the visages of some 90 Anchorage residents for their show titled "367 lbs of wax," which was seen at the MTS Gallery last summer.
For that show they cast masks of volunteers which they painted with lifelike detail and, eventually, destroyed. The melting of the faces was recorded on video.
The Mountain View Road Improvement Project art is different in that it's intended to be permanent. The final casts, set in steel or some other durable material, will be made of fiberglass and illuminated from behind. They'll glow. The artists call them "lamps."
Pollock of Anchorage and Kese of Washington state met as arts students at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., but didn't become collaborators until after they graduated. Since then they've indulged in experimental work without knowing, in advance, exactly how things would turn out.
"We become distracted," said Pollock. "It's an excuse to explore."
The current project is like that, said Kese. "It's important to note that our concept is what was selected, rather than a specific project. Our artistic project is different from the usual linear route of design, plan, execute."
That's not the same as acting on artistic whim, she added. "We come in with really specific ideas -- casting faces, in this case."
One specific idea was to involve the people who would most likely see the finished work on a daily basis.
"We didn't want to plunk a statue down in the middle of Mountain View without input from the community," said Kese.
At this point in the process they are still looking for people willing to go through the process of lying still for several minutes, breathing through straws while plaster sets up around their heads.
They're working with the Red Apple grocery store, Boys and Girls Club, churches and other neighborhood facilities to get the 40 to 50 faces they'd like to see in the finished work.
Neither of the artists seemed worried that they don't have those faces just yet.
They only got the nod on the project last fall and couldn't begin work in earnest until January, when they returned from separate trips; Pollock was in Vermont on a grant working with master caster Mark Prent and Kese was installing work at a gallery in Lima, Peru.
Besides things went slowly last time.
"At first it was really hard to convince people" to participate in "367 lbs of wax," said Kese. "Then it just snowballed as people told their friends."
While it sounds like a revisiting of that show, this new effort is unexplored territory for them in the sense that neither one had worked in fiberglass before.
"We have the Tyvex suits, gas masks and rubber gloves we need," said Pollock. "The process and materials are important as collaborators."
The volatile nature of the medium led them to move from small quarters in the Turnagain Arts Center to a large Quonset hut on Ship Creek. "Our old space was something of a death trap," said Kese.
"We learned that you don't melt heads in a 400-square-foot room," said Pollock.
All part of the team's approach. "The thing about going in without a plan is that some accidents that couldn't happen if we had a plan turn out to be the best part," said Pollock.
They're already not planning their next project, which will take them to some vacant houses in Tacoma where they have permission to live and work and, they hope, move on to casting whole bodies.
But what will be the result? Well ...
"We could tell you whatever we wanted," said Kese. "But that's not what's going to happen."
Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332.
By MIKE DUNHAM
mdunham@adn.com