Todd Boss is planning an ambitious public art installation at the historic
Saint Paul Union Depot that explores themes of arrival and departure.
Boss, a local poet, public artist, and a co-founder of
Motionpoems, intends to turn the landmark building into a 3D screen for various short films based on original poems. His project, titled, "
Arrivals and Departures," will coincide with the
Saint Paul Art Crawl in October 2014.
Films will be projected onto the building’s façade every five minutes so the Depot appears to be moving along a rail line, he explains. "The idea is to inspire Minnesotans to think about the Depot and to attempt a poem about what it symbolizes,” he says.
In the coming years, the recently renovated Depot will be a multimodal hub for various forms of transit. Boss's project celebrates the building's turnaround. “I want this to be a sort of reclamation of the space. I want it to be one way in which we give that space new meaning, and possess it again,” he says.
The poetry that will inspire the films is emerging out of a statewide poetry contest for which
The Loft Literary Center is a sponsor. The contest deadline is Jan. 15, the same day that the
Kickstarter campaign ends. Boss is trying to raise $20,000 through Kickstarter. He hopes to remount the project annually over the next four years. He also wants to document the process through film.
Boss encourages contest entrants to think broadly about the theme, not literally. For him, the theme has to do with “second chances and opportunity and this melting pot nation that we have. All of the things that we associate with departure and arrival,” he says.
Depending on how much funding the project secures, as many as 10 poems could move forward, he says. At that point, local filmmakers will be invited to interpret the poems in film. It’s all about “locally-sourced, community-making,” he says.
Boss credits his wife, Amy, for coming up with the original idea for the installation. One day last year, when they were working on a separate project, “She sat down at the kitchen table and said, ‘You know what would be cool?’ And she laid out a vision of a projected image of a landscape slowly going by, to make it look like the view out of a train car,” he says. “The poet part of my brain just recognized the poetic gesture of that.”
Source: Todd Boss, Poetry in Motion
Writer: Anna Pratt