Sunday, January 20, 2013

Seen outside Rose Garden Arena, after the game

Click here for a trip to City Daily Photo, transporting you around the world every day.

DSC_0230_cropped

I took this photo Saturday, January 19, after the basketball game. The Milwaukee Bucks won, not us. However, I am a fan, no matter what. 

We don't normally have fog like this, so I am happy to have had the opportunity to take a few photos out in it. Looking southwest towards the Willamette River and downtown Portland, you cannot see the Steel Bridge or the grain elevators--much less the lights of downtown--the fog's that thick. 

Bits I discovered online about the sculpture. 
  • The Little Prince, by Ilan Averbuch. Copper and steel, 1995. 
  • The Little Prince is a partially buried copper crown located at the south end of the arena in the Rose Quarter. It is a piece about imagination, desires and aspirations, conquests and struggles. It is the job of the viewer to create the story that goes along with the crown. Is it a victory and position of honor waiting to be claimed, or is there another story? Only the viewer can say.
  • Ilan's inspiration for this piece was the "Little Prince" by Antoine De Saint-Exupery, in particular, the first chapter where he talks about his drawing of a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant being misunderstood as a hat.
  • Ilan Averbuch's "Little Prince" and the Portland Trailblazer's Rose Garden Arena. Portland, Oregon . . . legend has it that the crown will be stood upright when the Blazers with their next championship.
  • The Little Prince, 1995, is a gigantic fallen crown, an image of a ruin of ancient majesty, of one-time splendor, and a version of another recurring theme in Averbuch’s work: the obsolescence of the monumental, former monuments in the soil, like ancient relics.
  • The Little Prince (Ilan Averbuch, 1996) is a copper crown, standing 15 feet tall in front of the Rose Garden. Inspired by the French children's story by Antoine De Saint-Exupery, the artist asks that you use your imagination to think of a story behind the crown. The crown is resting on its side perhaps waiting as a prize to be claimed or as a symbol of a triumph to come.
DSC_0229 Here's another view of it. It's on a bit of an elevation from street level, the height of which is well-represented here by its juxtaposition with the bottom windows of that double-decker bus from Kells Irish Restaurant & Pub which is in downtown PDX. DSC_0575 Another photo of "The Little Prince" that I took on October 16, 2010. DSC_0574 And one more, with a part of the Rose Garden Arena visible on the other side of it.

3 comments:

Bob Crowe said...

The top two look post-apocalyptic to me - very intense. I wouldn't have associated it with Le Petit Prince. Certainly not little, and he appears to have been deposed.

Birdman said...

WOW! If the 'little prince' wears this I'd hate to see the King's crown. hahaha

Randy said...

What an amazing sculpture. I love that book.