Night Shift
Location: #9 Located in Town Center Park behind Park Tower and The Westin South Coast Plaza.
Piece: Night Shift
While most of the artworks in the collection were clearly brought from the outside and installed there, Jim Huntington’s sculpture looks as if it might have grown out of a grassy mound on the peaceful park between the Imperial Bank building and the Westin South Coast Plaza Hotel. Although the rugged granite and stainless steel form of Huntington’s “Night Shift” breaks the smooth contours of the gently rolling parkland, it echoes familiar natural elements. The sculpture causes visitors to pause and wonder about how it got there and to what degree art has merged with nature.
“Night Shift’s” harmony with the landscape is consistent with the artist’s sensibility. A New York sculptor whose work has been extensively exhibited and collected, Huntington often lets the forms, colors and surfaces of quarried stone direct his vision. In making “Night Shift”, he selected a massive chunk of Sierra white granite and cut it into an irregular form, 10 feet long and 9 feet wide. A rectangular plate of stainless steel, polished to pick up colors but not reflect images, abruptly slices through the top of the stone.
Despite its apparent naturalness, “Night Shift” is certainly meant to unify human feelings with nature. We feel the force of rough meeting smooth, of steel slicing stone and of hard surfaces being articulated with tiny markings and fluted edges. Rust washed over one jagged section of granite that cascades down from the top before coming to a halt at a sheer cliff. All the elements seem to be present here, together with the feelings evoked by them.
Docent:
Jim Huntington - Nightshift
Bio: (1941 -) Elkhart, Indiana. Jim Huntington attended Indiana University and EI Camino College in EI Camino, California. He currently lives and works in New York City. His father was a blue-collar factory worker and over the years worked his way up to a white-collar job. By both example and instruction he taught his son respect for the simple, basic values of the Midwest -hard work, integrity and dignity. He gave Huntington a sense of his own worth and the courage to act.
Huntington believes that inspiration, diligence and perseverance will ultimately get him what he wants. In his earliest consciousness, he remembers having a sense of infinite … to dream, to become, and though he has always been a dreamer, the pragmatism of the puritan work ethic has been his tether to the earth. Over the years, he has grown to appreciate deeply and understand the values that were imbued in him at an early age and to feel them as a source of sustaining strength in pursuing his vision as an artist.
The Piece: Nightshift is located in the park between Park Tower and The Westin South Coast Plaza. Huntington was commissioned by Henry T. Segerstrom to create the sierra white granite and stainless steel sculpture. The irregular-shaped piece is 10 feet long, 9 feet wide and weighs approximately 30 tons. The large stone is white with small black flecks, a polished stainless steel plate slices into the top of the stone. The steel plate is polished enough to pick up colors but not to reflect images. It was sculpted in a granite quarry near Fresno, California. Huntington’s sensitivity in the use of stone and stainless steel provides a perfect compliment for the natural, open setting of Town Center Park.
Trivia: Jim Huntington received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant in 1986.