Man Repeatedly Drowns in Elevator Lobby

Seven new art installations unveiled in the City Light Building.

Yuki Nakamura, Filament, slip cast porcelain light bulbs and 2-channel video projections.
Photo © Spike Mafford.

The elevators in Seattle’s Municipal Tower rise very fast. Standing inside them, you can feel the cages sway. The Muni is Seattle’s second-tallest building and holds five thousand tenants.

Seattle City Light’s offices are nested on seven separate floors high in the Tower. A couple of years ago, when the floors were renovated, Deborah Paine, Curator and Collections Manager in the Mayor’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, saw an opportunity. The Office could bring art into the public utility’s lobbies via commission with the Percent for Art program, which supports public art projects. This widely admired arts-fostering plan, over thirty years old, allows 1 percent of capital project funds to be scooped out and used to commission and purchase art.

Paine spearheaded the lobby project and views the commissions as “a chance for artists to stretch in their artistic endeavor.” Her energy and pragmatism helped get the project off the ground.

Now, as workers and visitors step off the elevators into the City Light offices, they are presented with new art instead of the old walls. Paine’s national selection process, via peer committee, ultimately commissioned seven artists to create original works for the seven lobbies: light sculptures by Claude Zervas, metal wall structures by Victoria Haven, a video installation by Kerry Skarbakka, paintings by Margie Livingston, a porcelain lightbulb installation by Yuki Nakamura, enameled, illustrated panels by Emily Ginsburg and framed wool, thread and satin blankets by Marie Watt.

Nakamura’s piece (on the 30th floor) stands out. Rows of bulbs are attached to the lobby wall in rigorously horizontal formations, painted off-white with a hard matte finish, molded in porcelain from contemporary and vintage lightbulbs, some familiar, some in oblong shapes with odd protrusions. The rows of bulbs are delicious, their shape not quite organic, but sensual, and they’re difficult to look away from. They stand in rigorous formation, and wobbling noodles of light move along their surfaces. It’s a brain-teaser of a piece, evoking our overuse of energy while hypnotizing us with its light.

In Haven’s sculptures (35th floor), flat, firm aluminum and steel grids in varying curving and angular shapes suggest land formations or sine waves. Though they are flat, the blue, white, silver and black metal panels bring depth and curve to the lobby wall. Their grids bring to mind the immense grid of the Municipal Tower itself, and how, from the outside, its thousands of employees are invisible.

“I like the way the space becomes part of the atmosphere of the piece,” Haven says, indicating the expanse of wall behind her work. “Here,” she points, “you can see the negative more thanthe positive space.” It’s true — in Grid, the shadow thrown onto the wall from the sculpture is, at least initially, more noticeable than the sculpture itself.

For most of the artists selected for this project (by peer committee), the job was a chance at a first public commission — an ideal way to get time and support; it also feeds a challenge. Says Haven, “Other than the formal and conceptual concerns I have when I make work in my studio, I was thinking about how this work would operate in a public setting. The reflective surfaces might draw passersby in visually, but would the employees engage with the work beyond this level?”

Skarbakka’s video installation (28th floor) has created quite a bit of reaction among employees. The piece incorporates five neatly parallel HD screens. In the fifty-minute video that unrolls across the screens, a stressed-looking suited man (Skarbakka) moves through physical, elemental extremes: taking a tumble on concrete, floating and swimming limply in silty pond water and running and leaping while he appears to be on fire. Skarbakka remarks, “The work represents more than mini-adventures. I’m taking an environmental approach. Especially with water. Water is the next big source of political tension for us, and I think that’s my largest statement in this.” While some of the landscape imagery is soothing (shot from a slowly-moving hot air balloon), the video has proven provocative among City employees for the tension it creates.

“Well, it’s evoked a lot of feelings, but I guess that’s what art’s supposed to do,” says one customer service employee. “Some people actually really like it. I stood here, I think once, for a full twenty minutes, determined to watch the whole thing,” she says. “But one person here had a family member drown and I guess they really got upset. I guess lots of people have said something.”

Another employee remarks affably: “Well, I don’t like the guy falling down on the hill . . . it makes me hurt just thinking about it!” She laughs. “But I don’t mind the art. It’s OK.”
Another employee focused on Skarbakka’s fire section. “I know what it’s about,” she told me. “These people are looking at the movie and they imagine they’re in that fire, like the guy. They watch it, and they just want to escape, that’s all they want to do right then — just like he wants to escape.”

Though Skarbakka’s installation has a quiet electronic soundtrack, the real aural backdrop to his and all the elevator lobby art is the sounds of the elevators themselves: dings, squeaks of cables, rising and falling “whooshes” and the hollow hum of rushing air, depending on the time of day and level of elevator usage. During peak hours, these sounds are almost constant. Toward the end of the workday, when the employees are mostly gone, it’s quieter, except for the occasional lunge of an elevator car that means somewhere in the building, an employee is waiting to be ferried away.