Greetings, sports fans.

It’s about 105F outside now, but I still stir from within the air-conditioned confines of the East Jesus nerve net / radio shack / promotions office, just to go and once again have a look at Cosmos – the mesmerizing, elegant sculpture by Royce Carlson, on display here until it finds a new, permanent home with someone wealthier than myself. If I had the twenty grand, I’d buy it outright. I will be very sad to see it go. Contact Royce directly at <zenzibar@earthlink.net> if you happen to be interested.

The piece already has a bit of history and infamy. It was on display at Burning Man in 2004, and appeared in the movie Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis. It’s long been my dream to take sneaky advantage of the fact that I have lots of space virtually for free, and there are lots of large sculptures out there whose storage fees are slowly draining the coffers of the artists. Technically, the Transit Antenna bus was the first artwork to be added to the collection from the outside, but that’s in a class of its own – artwork, mobile home, museum and monument to itself, installation and guest house…. Cosmos is a *sculpture*, period.

Over on the “dark side” of the sculpture garden, where a more chaotic, post-apocalyptic sensibility and stories of The Fall of Western Civilization told in a dozen assemblages made of junk reign supreme, Joe Holliday’s Mammoth saw its resurrection – at least the first phase of it. With a skeleton crew of helpers working in the afternoon heat, the parts were unloaded, concrete footings were poured and the armature was assembled, awaiting a larger gathering of participants to hoist it up into place and finish its skin. After some seeing and sawing about whether or not music and festivities in honor of Mammoth’s erection would take place here, it’s beginning to look once again as if some sort of festival will indeed happen. In any case, all signs point to at least a final assembly and upright-making on June 19th.

Like much of Holliday’s art – installations, graphics and sculpture – the Mammoth is raw, aggressive, and brilliant in its visionary scope. Joe begins with abstract, ontological ideas within a conceptual framework, incorporating process and discovery and the ever-present limitations of whatever material happens to be on hand in the realization and representation of the idea. Accordingly, finished works are challenging, richly textured, and reveal density and complexity to the diligent observer. These photos is no way do the Mammoth justice – they are shown solely for their documentary value, and in a kind of surreal contrast to the final, standing sculpture. Proof we did something this weekend.

Mammoth is to become a permanent installation of the East Jesus sculpture garden.

Cosmos (by Royce Carlson) in motion from chasterus on Vimeo.