The 2023 edition of the Penticton Public Sculpture Exhibit kicked off early Thursday morning with the installation of a couple of giants, both from returning artists.
Just outside city hall, crews started the day installing Jean Ouellon's "1760" -- an enormous wine bottle weighing 629 pounds and made entirely of used, welded horseshoes.
Sculpture watchers will know the Kaleden-based Ouellon for his "Pearl the Pandemic Salmon," a fishy piece that resided nearly a full year on the Okanagan Lake waterfront as part of the 2022-23 exhibit and ultimately won the coveted "Peoples' Choice Award."
But while Pearl was comprised of 700-plus horseshoes, 1760 kicks it up a notch at approximately 1,000.
"If you put a bladder in it, you could put 1760 liters of wine in it," laughed Ouellon in explaining the moniker. "I just couldn’t get a better name."
The obsession with horseshoe art (he has a family of horseshoe bears at the Penticton Regional Hospital, a horseshoe pig at Doug's Homestead on Hwy 97, among other works) began in 2014 from a desire to eliminate waste.
"There's so many of them kicking around," he said. "And if a farrier brings them to a scrap yard, they need 500 pounds before they get any money out of it."
Pearl took five months to complete in the midst of the pandemic, at four to five hours a day. 1760 took six months, also during the pandemic.
Yesterday, Ouellon took delivery on another 300 horseshoes for a new, undecided project. Once that's done, he says, his horseshoes-as-art mania will come to a conclusion.
Mere minutes after the install of 1760, attention shifted to the lakefront where artist Karl Mattson had just arrived, driving in all the way from his home and studio in Rolla, BC, not far from Dawson Creek.
In the trailer attached to his pickup truck, Mattson had two of his pieces -- one destined for the Castlegar Sculpture Walk and the other for the Penticton exhibit.
It was the sculpture bound for Castlegar that'll undoubtedly ring familiar to Pentictonites.
In 2020, Mattson brought his post-apocalyptic ode to a failing environment called "Lost" to Penticton's Front Street roundabout for a year. It was one of the most memorable sculptures ever to grace the PPSE. And today, Lost's little sister, "Lost - Adrift," triggered memories of the original, which now sits on a cliff overlooking the eastern shore of Okanagan Lake.
But for 2023, Mattson brings Penticton something quite distinct from the humanoid Lost. It weighs 800 pounds, looks like a tree and its roots, and is named "Intersect."
"My works are all about mankind's complacent march into uncertainty," said Mattson. "This one shows the intersection of the urban environment with nature.
The official tag line is: "Woven realities: The integral relationship between nature and the new forms that nature takes on in the urban environment."
"It's made of cold rolled steel," said Mattson. "There are some antlers in there too and other found objects, concrete, salvage material, and I used welding and a 50 ton hydraulic press (to put it all together)."
Like most Mattson stuff, Intersect is a wee bit bizarre. It portrays a tree pushing though an aging slab of urban concrete. At the bottom is the root ball, in the middle -- at viewer head level -- is the ground. And above that is the "tree."
It's a tree-mendously unique perspective that's bound to turn heads.
"I wanted that cross-section of earth, rather than being at you feet, up high where it can be seen," said Mattson of the piece he began in January and finished in April.
Moreover, Intersect will "mature" as it ages.
"The cold rolled steel will oxidize," said Mattson. "It'll look more like the color of a tree within a few months. It even has ports for LED lights, but there's no power on the waterfront."
The rest of the sculptures making up this year's exhibit will be installed Friday. For more info on the Penticton Public Sculpture Exhibit, turn here.
