Pathway to Everywhere

As you drive down 4^th Ave. SW crossing 2^nd St. you can get a glimpse on your right of a large-scale indoor/outdoor sculpture extruding from a building’s glass façade. The acrylic panelled structure configured as figure eights resembling Mobius strips extend into the lobby of the Jamieson Place building “Pathways to Everywhere”.

Composing the dominant forms of the work is a collection of pathways interposing each other with motorized revolving doors angling inward like a blade or drilling drill bit. Pathways to Everywhere shifts and loops between the upper and lower levels similar to miners working the geological strata.

The steel and acrylic sculpture was commissioned to Dennis Oppenheim through The City of Calgary Public Art Program and installed in March of 2010. Dennis is an American conceptual artist, performance artist, earth artist, sculptor and photographer who focuses on using the surrounding environment in a metaphorical way as with all his permanent outdoor sculptures created in his later years. As with “Pathways to Everywhere”, Oppenheim retains the need to design according to the site-specific characteristic which has been important for him since the sixties.

The deeply routed content from the site often penetrates the mystique of mining and establishing in the work itself a sandblasted brick pattern that increases in density as the work continues as seen from above the escalator toward the front facade.