"A Place For Our Thoughts" is a public art installation created by Angel Axioma Alcala, originally commissioned by TEMPO, a part of the City of Austin’s Art in Public Places (AIPP) program of the Cultural Arts Division, Economic Development Department, for its 2019 iteration. Recently acquired and rededicated for the Pflugerville Public Library.
This project was to make an artwork for the public to interact with Art, and to share a vision of a broader global society that values the sharing of knowledge & understanding.
For this temporary project to be interactive and be functional, it was essential to design a durable structure that is easily fabricated, installed, uninstalled, moved. The sculpture has a visual language that invites the viewer to approach it without hesitation and that makes the act of sitting a conscious physical process. For those reasons, the sculpture was made of basic geometry of powder-coated aluminum in a solid color for its intrinsic simplicity and material strength.
Easily identifiable figurative imagery was chosen as the elements for a symbol to represent how we preserve knowledge. The silhouetted profile of a child symbolizes the potential for growth and learning. The complexity of the mind is represented by a Voronoi pattern, that is both naturally occurring and mathematically applicable. As part of the community outreach, I incorporated the silhouettes of volunteers into the final design. These silhouettes of people in the pattern represent the members of Society that are authors of knowledge that have shared their ideas that are now the basis for others to form their concepts of the world.
Our collective Human memory is a multigenerational collection of minds. A vast collection that connects all of us through time, space, and meaning. Our minds are physical places where these memories exist during our lives. We live on through our ideas and stories that we share and that others carry and later pass on.
Knowledge is transferred through generations, through a long line of people. This knowledge is advanced and refined by each generation to form their own improved world that they leave to a new generation, to repeat the cycle.
By combining the sculptural form and the viewer, the artwork becomes an interactive space and an image that the viewer participates in to complete. When sitting inside the niche, they became the personification of knowledge in the mind.
