the-gate-serra

• the work is beautiful and large, not on a Serra scale but on a human scale. Its size is perfect — both dwarfing us as people and dwarfed by the landscape that surrounds it. The hills nearby the sculpture allow us to climb the hill and see it from overhead, not a bird’s eye view but close.
• Obviously, like so much of Serra’s work, “porten i sluggen” is playing with perspective. Looking down the gorge at it, the two giant metal pieces seem to overlap. The meeting point appears as a chicane the viewer is forced to navigate as they escape the woods and move towards the ocean. In reality, the two sheets are separated by almost 30 feet. When seen from the other direction (looking up the hill) they seem to almost be separate entities.
• the interaction of the sheets and nature is half with the landscape and half with the foliage. the sheets are physically buried into the hillside, especially the downhill sheet which seems to be almost entirely embedded within the hillside. Because they are embedded into the hill, the sculpture has become a structural element in the evenrionment. It is the nature as much as it complements it.
• But, it is also complemented. While the leaves in the trees are green, orange, fallen leaves coat the ground close to the work.
• there’s a patens on the downhill sheet (closer to the hillside) that are really pretty
• it’s like a door that has opened long long ago, the trees are impossibly in the swinging path of the door
• guarding the roots of the uphill
• What happens with rain?