Garden of Evidence Dennis Oppenheim		Print This Page Email This Page

Update

•  SPA Board approved the new project on May 11, 2004

•  Public Presentation of Artist Proposal on July 20, 2005

•  SPA Board approved Project Artist and Preliminary Concept on August 9, 2005

•  Open House with public presentation of completed sculpture  and sculpture in progress on November 8, 2008

•  SPA Board Update June 10, 2009

•  Installation to be completed August 2009

•  Grand Opening ceremony September 10, 2009

Site Description
The McKellips Service Center is an 80,000 sq/ft facility located at the southeast corner of McKellips and Miller Roads, a residential area on the border of Scottsdale and Tempe. The facility provides fleet maintenance, and evidence storage, houses a forensics lab and to serves as a police station for District One. Public access is limited to a community room at the police station and reception areas, where people may fill out reports, speak with a detective or to pick up personal items. The public art will be sited at the 8,000 sq/ft public plaza at the front of the facility facing McKellips Road.

Project Description
Dennis Oppenheim's Garden of Evidence is sculpture and landscape elements distributed throughout the entry plaza of the forensics lab and the police station. Six architectural scale prickly pear cactus forms are placed within shadow forms which play with the vertical shapes on the ground plane. Forms of evidence analyzed inside the forensic lab provide the imagery for other landscape elements. These tools of investigation combine with the interlocking cactus and bench forms to create pieces of thematic puzzle.

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Media

Water jet-cut aluminum, galvanized steel, acrylic, composite aluminum, colored cast resin benches, hand-painted clay tiles, steel and aluminum headers, decomposed granite.

About the Artist

Recently selected to participate as an artist in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China, Dennis Oppenheim continues to be an influential figure in international contemporary art. He first achieved recognition for conceptual work in the sixties, traversing through Earth and Body Art, video and performance. Using his body as a site to challenge the self, he also explored, through numerous gallery and museum installation, the boundaries of personal risk, transformation, and communication.

In the eighties, he used complex constructions, machine-factory installations to create metaphors for the artistic process. Transformation through mutation was the basis for sculpture through the nineties. Since then the artist has concentrated on permanent public sculpture. Through this work he fuses an interest in architecture with sculpture.

Dennis Oppenheim was born in 1938 in Electric City, Washington. He received his B.F.A. from the School of Arts and Crafts, and an M.F.A. from Standford University. Dennis Oppenheim lives and works in New York.

Sculpture in fabrication	Forensics imagery for tiles
Tiles in fabrication	Puzzle bench with fingerprints
One of Six Recently Installed Sculptures

Project Manager

Jana Weldon

janaw@sccarts.org

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