The Future Stands Still but We Move in Infinite Space

1320 SW Broadway (former Oregonian building), Portland, Oregon
2016
Mirror, etched mirror, LED light panels
6' x 200' x 2'
Commissioned by Urban Renaissance Group and the Regional Arts & Culture Council

The Future Stands Still but We Move in Infinite Space runs a full city block along the 6th Avenue transit mall in downtown Portland, Oregon. Thirty-six etched and illuminated mirror chambers are built permanently into the base of the building, developed in collaboration with Allied Works Architecture.

The reverse-etched imagery begins with a view of the building from above. Chamber by chamber, as a viewer walks the block, the perspective pulls back until it arrives at the Milky Way seen from very far away. From a distance the work reads as one glowing line. Up close, each chamber is its own small world, and details come into focus as the imagery shifts with the viewer's position.

This stretch of the bus mall was a drab place to walk and wait, and our aim was to give commuters a different sense of their place in the universe in the middle of an ordinary day. It worked. People stop, lean in, and bend their bodies to make the images move inside the mirrors. The title comes from a line in Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Like that book, the work asks viewers to slow down, look up, and find something expansive in a shared, everyday place.