When visiting first Thursday in downtown Portland I had the desire to find some sculpture or other 3-d form of art that would be fairly eerie and evoke emotion. To my surprise I ended up choosing to write about a bronze killer whale, which is not eerie and did not evoke an emotion I could understand. For some reason I could not take my eyes off of it. Power Play, by Scott Hanson is a casted bronze sculpture of a killer whale. The whale supports its body by elegantly balancing on its tail, as if frozen in the middle of a well orchestrated dance. The whale’s fin seems to be bringing up the ocean current as its partner in the movement. It’s amazing to me how the sculpture from afar looks so metallic and golden, yet up close it looks almost as if the artist used the true colors of the killer whale. The sculpture has this mystifying balance between the sculpture itself and the negative space created around the whale’s dorsal fin, almost how a crescent moon looks balanced in the sky although there is a giant gap between each end of the moons visible surface. The artwork is very realistic in the way of the whale’s looks and form, yet is very abstract and humanized in the way it is dancing. It almost looks like a human ballet dancer in whale form. This piece reminds me of the connectivity and the faded line between animals, humans, and the earth.
Jordan Lane
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