Visitors engaging the "Drossian Ark Glenwood Object-19" (D.R.A.GO-19) metal sculpture at BRING Recycling's “Garden of Earthly Delights”, in Glenwood, Oregon. (Photo courtesy of Chris Pietsch/The Register-Guard)
Working in the Archive Designs workshop, sculptors Jeff Shauger and Joe Mross spent over 18 months welding scrap to create the "DRAGO 19" sculpture, finally creating an interactive sculpture of three large monoliths, making up many tons of weight--probably over 20,000 pounds--total.
Although the sculpture is made up of thousands of locally scavenged (mostly metallic) parts of every kind, the sculpture critically incorporates elements from historical local sites, such as melted boiler plates from Eugene's Civic Stadium (after the historical building unfortunately burned down in 2015), saw-blades from Springfield lumber mills, and rusted antique truck parts hauled out of the Willamette Valley woods. As part of creating the sculpture, there was a necessity to go out to find big gears, bridge girders, the industrialized nature of what’s happened locally in the past one hundred years.
“The sculpture is an ark that was determined to find resources here,” Shauger said, describing the piece's imagined backstory. “Then it crashed and became the resource from which all the things we know come from.” There’s an irony to it, Shauger said: A craft on a mining mission collides with the Earth, splintering into the million capital goods that people know and use every day. And the pair of artists then regathered the pieces, as the backstory goes.
The road to completion of this project was a rocky one, spanning years, numerous meetings, funding highs and lows, and sudden unexpected funding changes and resultant design changes. Thus the artists are all the more pleased to see the work completed and being engaged by the public.
(More articles/media regarding the DRAGO-19 sculpture can be found at: Register Guard, Register Guard, KLCC, Facebook, and Eugene Weekly.)
