Sidewalk Dogs

Here's a shout-out to a former F&M art professor, who continues to inspire me with his photography of our inhabited environment and the people in it. Tyko Kihlstedt's most recent blog post is a compelling tour of public art in Los Angeles. Toward the end of the post, I saw something that particularly caught my eye. In Tyko's words . . .

The large sculpture seen behind the dog was designed by architect Lebbeus Woods, but not assembled and placed here until the year after he died. Woods was a visionary and thinker, not a designer of practical buildings. One obituary called him “the last of the great paper architects.” Don’t look for this sculpture today in Bloom Square. It was moved to the roof of a SCI-Arc trustee’s building on Main Street in 2014.

Dog in Anamorphic Perspective, [foreground], Earthwave, 2013, Lebbeus Woods [background sculpture],
Bloom Square, Arts District, Los Angeles, CA

What actually intrigues me more than the Woods sculpture is this painting of a dog using the perspective techniques of anamorphosis. Only when standing at one, precise location
does the viewer see the painted image properly. From any other position, the image appears distorted, sometimes radically so. In the above photograph, I have moved slightly, and one already can see how the image of the dog appears to be listing to our left. I have no idea who the artist is, but it is a truly delightful bit of perspectival play.

Dog in Anamorphic Perspective, [foreground], Earthwave, 2013, Lebbeus Woods [background sculpture],
Bloom Square, Arts District, Los Angeles, CA

As for me, I love the shadow of the dog, which is so realistic that even with the tilted dog, and even with shadows of real objects in the background heading off in a different direction, my initial knee-jerk reaction was, "How did the artist get a sidewalk mural to cast a shadow?"

My own dog invites me to play with her every time I come home, and this anamorphic sidewalk dog must do the same with passers by. It's got to be a lot of fun to move around and see the Husky sitting up or leaning over, depending on where you stand. Good dog!