Just Add Water & They Will Come
Location: Sacramento City Services Complex on Meadowview Road
Material: Cast concrete
Commissioned by: Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission, 2000
Collaboration with: Art students from Luther Burbank High School
Special thanks to: Dr. Peter B. Moyle, Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology, U.C. Davis
Artist’s Statement
This work was created in 2000 for a public commission that I received through the City of Sacramento. This piece is a freestanding sculpture consisting of ten solid tablets cast in concrete. The final piece functions as an entry sculpture for the Meadowview City Services Building, but the process of design centered around an educational seminar that focused on the fall-run Chinook salmon of Northern California. During the fall of 1999, I worked with an art class from Luther Burbank High School. As a group we visited the Nimbus Fish Hatchery, where students had the opportunity to tour the hatchery facility with a biologist from the U.S. Department of Fish and Game. Armed with sketchbooks and drawing material, they recorded their study of the salmon’s life cycle and some of the regional environmental conditions that the salmon face in the Sacramento area. Once back in the classroom, the students used their drawings and notations to develop image compositions that would be used in the final sculpture. Student compositions are displayed in basrelief on both sides of the free standing plinths. The top half of the sculptural units display a full size salmon, which I cast directly from real fish. The overall effect from eye level appears as a school of ten fish swimming in the river.
After September 2001, the City Service Facility was closed to the public. The artwork can be viewed by appointment.
Troy Corliss
www.troycorliss.com
