Dedication of artwork mounted outside 
Description of artwork mounted in the lobby at 1601 N Vine
Due to the pandemic, the dedication of The Spring occurred virtually in September of 2020. Installed in 2019, the sculpture was completed just days after the death of Corinne Wise Weitzman, the public art consultant who helped commission and smooth the path for this sculpture over the span of several years. Without her tireless dedication and commitment to the project, it would not have been created. Over the course of the project, we became close friends; Corinne and her family swam for me in their backyard pool so that I could use the underwater video footage to create the swimmers embedded in the lobbyside of the artwork.
She was a champion of the arts – advocating for female artists who are under-represented in general in the public realm. She promoted my work by including my portfolio in selection pools whenever appropriate. She was fun, cheerful, and optimistic to the end… even making sure that yacht rock played at her funeral – bringing a smile to our tear-stained faces one last time!
SEE PRESS RELEASE below or download press release: LINK
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 04, 2021
Hollywood, CA A permanent public art work that can be viewed safely indoors and outside has sprung up in Hollywood: its called The Spring, it is a 50’ long x 10’ tall continuous band of blue steel, and as one walks by, colorful graphics embedded in the sculpture move and flicker. Located at 1601 N. Vine on the NW corner of Vine and Selma (a block south of Hollywood and Vine), the artwork anchors the entry of the new WeWork Hollywood campus. Participating in the 1% for Art program through the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles, Jh Snyder Co. commissioned the artwork from Los Angeles-based artist Jenna Didier.
CONCEPT: Didier wanted to create a sculpture on this busy street corner that would respond to passersby. While researching ways to create movement from static images, Didier remembered this optical effect from a book she had as a child. Many months of tinkering ensued – culminating in a full-scale mock-up with stand-in graphics to dial in the geometries and the lighting of this multi-layered work. Double sided graphics housed within the tightly spaced steel bands of the sculpture animate as pedestrians walk/ drive/ scoot past on the street or through the lobby of the WeWork campus. Dark blue sharks flick their tails and glide through red and yellow waves along the street side of the sculpture, in the lobby, a family of people swim through colorful bubbles. The animated effect is analog – using an early optical technique that was the forerunner of modern animation to activate graphics screen printed on steel panels embedded in the sculpture.
CONSTRUCTION: The sculpture sits atop the 5’ deep stormwater catchment basin that processes stormwater for the building. It is full of soil and plants and captures rainwater that lands on the 8 story building’s roof. The plants sequester heavy metals in their roots, cleaning the water as it seeps into the storm drain gradually in the 24 hours following a storm event. Didier recognized an opportunity to call attention to the nearly-invisible process performed in the basin. Her work often incorporates environmentally-responsible techniques and promotes awareness of the reciprocal relationship of humans to their natural and built environments. For The Spring, Didier embedded a soil moisture sensor in the dirt that fills the basin. Depending on moisture levels that span from dry to saturated, the color changing LEDs that illuminate the interior of the sculpture change color – popping some graphics to the foreground and causing other layers of graphics to recede.
In this way, daily visitors to WeWork get a sense of what is happening in the functioning of the storm basin, raising their awareness of their environment and its connection to the sea.
About Jenna Didier: Seeking ways to engage viewers with forces and processes that are not immediately perceptible, Didier thinks of her artworks as machines that embed in the landscape or inhabit a building. Emerging from the Machine Art scene in San Francisco in the mid-to-late nineties, Didier founded a nonprofit organization nearly twenty years ago, Materials & Applications(M&A). Under her direction, M&A pushed the boundaries of the built environment via socially-engaged programs that experimented with materials and techniques. It continues to be a testbed for art, architecture, and public engagement. M&A projects have received much media attention and many awards including six AIA Design awards, grants from The Graham Foundation, the NEA, and the Andy Warhol Foundation.
Didier’s civic artwork binds art and technology as she creates large-scale explorations of water, ecology, geology and meteorology. Focusing critically upon issues and techniques that respond to scarcity and ecological sensitivity – she strives to demonstrate our role as stewards of water within our cities and on our public lands. The concepts for her work are often driven by intensive community engagement at the outset of a new project. Her work is site-driven and socially-responsive: revealing subtle environmental factors at a site while celebrating its rooted histories and connections to the natural world. Rather than beginning with a preconceived vision, Didier makes space for and invites creative input from stakeholders during the conceptual design of a new work. Her work has won awards including the American’s for the Arts Public Art Network (PAN) award for best public artwork of the year and has received support from the Durfee Foundation and the NEA.
LINK TO ARTIST’S WEBSITE: www.Responsive.Art
LINK TO ARTWORK PHOTOS/ VIDEOS
Project credits:
Client: Jh Snyder Co.
Public Art Consultant: Corinne Wise Weitzman
Engineering: NOUS Engineering
Fabricators: Ramirez Iron Works, KVO Industries
Installation contractor: PlasTal
Installation team supervisor: Roo Kraut
Electrical: O’Bryant Electric
Construction Documentation: Esmi Rennick
Graphic support and renders: William Reid
Optic engineering support: Simon Flory, Rechenraum
Lighting controls: Larry MacDonald
Brief description:
The Spring
Dedicated 2020
Jenna Didier
American, 1969-
Steel, paint, enamel, LED lighting, moisture sensor, electronics
50′ x 10′ x 5′
The Spring is a responsive sculpture mounted on the vegetated stormwater catchment basin that collects, filters, and slowly releases rain that falls on the roof of the office building at 1601 N Vine. Passing by the sculpture, your shifting perspective animates its embedded graphics. Lighting in the sculpture responds to moisture levels in the basin: colors change subtly with routine irrigation and dramatically with heavy rainfall, mimicking color indicators from weather radar and hiding or revealing different layers of graphics. Water ultimately flows out through a storm drain in the basin, like an urban spring to the sea.
