Caruso’s Dream Installation

Hovering delicately above the sidewalk, a sculptural canopy of angled and overlapping glass and steel pianos is held aloft in the eaves along the building’s frontage. These pianos, made from salvaged factory windows, are the building blocks of a physically commanding monumental sculpture. Brimming with entropic energies of a force of nature, this arrangement of materials on the side of a building evokes a precarious equilibrium of objects in space.Upright, grand and baby grand pianos, are intricately tied together with rope and supported from below by finely crafted wood braces. Here the formal rather than the functional qualities of the somewhat familiar components make up a single cohesive sculpture, citing Land Art in an Urban setting and bricolage emphasizing the artistic opportunities in quotidian objects. The pianos glimmer and shimmer during the day, as rays of natural light refract through the glass pianos and create brilliant prismatic patterns on the building and the sidewalk.  From dusk until dawn warm light emanate from the pianos, harmonically flickering to the majesty of Enrico Caruso’s operatic recordings. It is as if Enrico Caruso and his fellow performers appear as illuminated essences moving inside the pianos passing from one to another inside the composition, as actors move across a stage. An operatic drama unfolds as pedestrians discover the source and relationship of faint stirrings of opera music. By tuning into a short range FM transmitter, hidden within a single piano, discerning listeners will discover that they may be serenaded by the particular Caruso recording which inspired that moment’s light visualization dancing through the pianos.