It was enormous. Made of plaster, clay, papier-mâché and bits of flexible scrap metal. "Hey. Come up." She orders poking her head out from the large conglomerate of art stuff, then quickly disappearing back into the work.
He climbs the adjacent ladder, taking in the melding of one art medium to the next. Together all the mismatched pieces form a gigantic head, twice as tall as the 6' man examining it now.
"What do you think?" She says the moment she sees tufts of his black hair bobbing up slowly. He looks to the woman whose yards away, with several smudges on her face and paint smears trailing up her arms. She's folded her arms and leans on the sculpture, waiting for him to form an answer.
"It's cool."
"Well," she brings her arms out, ever gesturing, "it's cool that it's cool." He really was blown away at the magnitude of surface area Mísol had to work with. "The original idea was to make the facial features so androgynous, so broad, that the viewer could envision anyone's face in the work." She goes back to leaning her arms on the top of the giant head, an elbow in each hand. "I look at it and see my mom. You look at it and see the first roommate you had." She pauses and looks up at one of the many light fixtures. "In theory, anyway." She mumbles to herself.
When they both are back on the ground she slowly circles her work and Pierce follows her movements. "The best 'showing' I ever went to was Christo and Jeanne Claude, husband and wife. They built thousands of yellow and blue umbrellas, each nineteen feet and eight inches tall. They set them up in Japan, and Germany, and America. They were given a fifteen to thirty-mile radius in large government owned property to set these up in. Thousands," she reiterates. "From a helicopter it looked like the valley of Ibaraki was dotted with blue spots. One umbrella was ripped out of the ground during a hard storm and killed a man on impact." That wasn't the point of her story.
"I said that to say...you use art to feel small. You do these works on a large scale and you remember that you are tinier than a single star in the sky. That's what I think the point of it is; perspective." The same could be said for the smaller works of the bright engineer next to her. Maybe Pierce did feel himself welling up inside as he looked at the large sculpture.
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