“There were lots of huge trucks with tons and tons of cement going in and out of the field.” That’s how one local resident remembers a time in her childhood when the now-famous “Shift” sculpture was being built in her neighbour’s back yard. It was 1971. As the concrete was poured deep into the ground, she and her playmates speculated about what it was supposed to be. Another local talks about accidentally coming upon Shift when he was
ten. He and his other 10-year-old buddies found it in a field they used as their
playground. They spent hours running along the top and jumping off it into
the snow that had drifted into big mounds against the walls. A third resident “Shift” is now privately owned by Great Gulf Homes. And Richard Serra’s career has progressed from his early work creating art out of cement in a field. He is now considered to be one of the greatest artists of the 21st century (Robert Hughes, 2005), hanging around with Frank O. Gehry and building installations in New York, San Francisco, Paris, and Spain. Richard Serra, known in the art world as the “Man of Steel,” has moved on. But Serra’s artistic roots are here, in the farmland just south of King City.
He describes Shift as the seminal piece in his creative thinking. He tells about
“borrowing” the field from the then-landowner, Roger Davidson, an avid art
collector, in exchange for a couple of small sculptures. Serra and his girlfriend
Jane Jonas walked the dog-leg valley between two hills in opposite directions
until they could barely see one another. They set the scene for the “first piece
of art which used the measure of one’s body walking, to deal with the Serra later changed his medium from cement to steel, a raw material he
was very familiar with because he had spent several years working at steel
mills to pay his way through art school. He became obsessed with how to
create a site-specific landscape sculpture that would physically involve the I visited “Tilted Spheres” a while ago when passing through the Toronto International Airport. It is a powerful series of circular steel walls that rise and curve towards one another. Stepping inside, one finds an overwhelming sense of calm, a refuge from the hustle and bustle of airport life. At the same time, our eye is drawn upward, as if at any moment we might take off and soar into space. Perhaps some day residents of King Township will be able to experience the thrill that Richard Serra’s world-famous art creates. And it will be right in our own back yard. |
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