Prairie Logic

Our paths have recently crossed with Janet Zweig–a Brooklyn-based artist who focuses primarily on kinetic sculptural work in the public realm. Her work is smart and subdued and often involves the spirited movement of many small parts, as can be seen in her three most recent works, described at the end of this post.

eldo is currently teaming with Janet on a piece that has only one moving part, albeit a very large one. “Prairie Logic”, will be located on a landscaped roof at 12th and Walnut, in downtown Kansas City. Locals may recognize this location as existing on the same block as Cosentino’s Market and its scantily clad cousin–The Jones pool.

Project Site Looking East

Site Plan

Prairie Logic was commissioned by the City of Kansas City, as part of their 1% for Art program. It consists of a custom-fabricated perforated cor-ten boxcar, glacially revolving around a 120 foot diameter railroad track situated in a rooftop-field of prairie grass. The boxcar is motorized, puttering along about 5 inches every night. Over the course of a year, it completes its circular journey.

Prairie Logic, Looking East

Section through Prairie Logic Boxcar

The piece is partly an expression of Janet’s appreciation of and fascination with our town. Kansas City’s history as a rail hub and its location in the Great Plains have both informed the work–along with Janet’s interest in the dialogue between urban and suburban cultures. As a collaborative team, we envision the piece as an expression of Americans’ desire to be “elsewhere”–an idea especially fitting for Kansas City, given our history as the gateway to the West during the days of the Oregon, California and Santa Fe trails. Prairie Logic has been approved by Kansas City’s Municipal Arts Commission, and is currently in the Construction Documentation phase, and should be operational by July.

Night View, Looking East

We love working with Janet. She is smart and funny and wise, and a great collaborator. Although she is a sleek New Yorker, she has embraced our fair city with gusto: slumming around the railroad tracks in the Crossroads, pounding the pavement in search of authentic hand-painted signage, devouring Jack Stack ribs with Falstaffian enthusiasm. We’re trying to figure out a way to keep her here once the project is completed.

She has a good website, www.janetzweig.com, and we would encourage you to check out her work. Recent examples include:

“Lipstick Enigma”, 2010. Located at the Harris Engineering Center at the Unversity of Central Florida in Orlando, the piece is a “sentence-generating machine” that uses a bank of 1,200 resin lipsticks in dot matrix pattern–powered by 1,200 wee motors.

“Limited Edition”, 2011. Located at the Brightwater Wastewater Treatment Plant in Woodinville, WA, Limited Edition utilizes a 245 foot long heavy gage steel element, perforated with 150,000 holes. Each hole is a potential destination for one of 150,000 magnetized golden tiles, distributed one at a time to visitors through a stylized “spigot”. The piece is about choice, and time. Visitors are not required to place their tiles in the grid–it’s up to them.

“Pedestrian Drama”, 2011. For this piece, Janet traveled back to her hometown of Milwaukee, where she collaborated with 200 of her closest friends. Pedestrian Drama consists of five kiosks on downtown streets, each of which contains three animated pedestrian scenes, communicated cleverly through the use of old-school train schedule “flap sign” technology.