Building on the experience of previous permanent installation projects, I created two installation pieces for The Tauri Group, a high technology company in Alexandria, Virginia. Over the winter I made Transformation (above), a triptych of wood tiles which progressively express the process of the evolving universe. This spring I completed Ascendant, a 9-foot tall sculpture featuring an 8 foot walnut vase. Both sculptures are designed with the client's corporate image and culture in mind, and detailed with forms significant to the business and their technical work.

The Transformation Panels

The Transformation panels suggest three stages in the development of life: star formation; solar system formation; and, the emergence of intelligent life. Twenty-four thousand dressmaker pins are used to create the metal designs in the panels.

Underlying the symbols is homage to the mathematician Fibonacci. His famous sequence (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, …), and the golden ratio derived from it, is used throughout. Starting with the tiny pair of purple heart squares in each panel, successive squares spiral outward, with the dimension of each succeeding square equal to the sum of the dimensions of the previous two: a Fibonacci sequence.

Ascendant: The 9-Foot Vase

Ascendant is an assembly of 300 hand cut and mitered Peruvian Walnut blocks. After shaping the wood into the form of the vase I traced out the double helix design (DNA). Between the double helix spirals I carved four-pointed stars from the company's logo and hexagons representing molecular symbols.

These projects represent a line of work I hope to expand, building on my ability to listen to the client, capture their ideas, feelings and values, and create a sculpture that is at once beautiful, meaningful and most important, about them. I find corporate installations to be particularly rewarding and satisfying work. A major initiative is to engage more corporate clients in addition to private commissions.

New Corporate Reception Area

Tauri Group Corporate Headquarters

Rant of the Month

Been paying attention to ArtPrize? It's an art competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan open to all artists worldwide. Artists and venues each enroll, and the venues choose which artists they want to show. When the exhibit opens, in late September, the public gets to vote, by text message or email. Winner by public vote gets $250,000. Second place is awarded $100,000. Third place gets $50,000. Seven Honorable Mentions get $7,000 each.

Many people are shocked that the public will decide who gets a cool quarter of a million dollars. "What!," they say, "the public is going to make a decision on the best art? They don't know enough, they aren't qualified, blah, blah, blah."

My rant is that art is for the public, and who better to decide what art best reaches their emotions, or phyche, or whatever? Isn't art for the public? Or are the cynics amongst us right, that the museums and curators have captured the formal art world and decided, in their snobbery, to tell the lowly general public what is good art and what is bad?

As it is, the art is being curated into the show in some fashion. The venues have committees to review the applications and choose who they want. Right there the exhibit is self-limiting. The public can only vote on what makes it into the show, anyway.

But still ... isn't it cool that the traditional judges, such as museum directors or university professors, will have to stand and watch as the general public tells them what's best? I love it.

Custom corporate and private commissions accepted:

jmagnan@johnmagnan.com • 22 Centre Street • New Bedford, MA 02740 • 508-999-5051