Sculptor: Doron Rosenthal
Commissioned by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture and the Hillcrest Business Association.
The permanent installation of natural granite markers into the sidewalk of San Diego’s Hillcrest District in an effort to offer an educational walking experience for its diverse and growing community. The title for this original project is FOSSILS EXPOSED. Installation is scheduled to begin October 1998.
FOSSILS EXPOSED involves the creation and installation of 150 circular 4.5 inch granite markers. Each represent the artist’s interpretive carvings of local and regional fossilized plant and animal life, which are sandblasted into granite. Each marker will be sunk into existing concrete sidewalks over a one mile area; beginning at Park Boulevard and continuing west on University Avenue to First Street. There will be identification markers at the corner of Fifth Street and University Avenue.
The objective of FOSSILS EXPOSED is to reinterpret the experience of fossil hunting in nature by creating “urban fossils” and setting them randomly into the sidewalk over a one mile area. The intentional random positioning allows for individual discovery, forcing the viewer to seek out, hunt for and finally “discover” fossils of past plant and animal life indigenous to the San Diego area.
Due to its dimensional qualities, the sculptures change throughout the day. They interact with the course of the sun, both by reflection off the highly polished surface as well as by moving shadows. Maps will be distributed to the Hillcrest business community for their customers, encouraging participation to do rubbings of the stone carvings.
The imagery is inspired by the fossil collections from the San Diego Museum of Natural History. Each marker is different, representing various plant and animal species covered over by modern day urban development. The project would encourage awareness of the levels of life that struggled to exist within the area–some in the past, some in the present.
With this awareness in mind, the project goes one step further by incorporating waste material as its primary medium. The granite markers are waste end pieces donated from a local monument carver, which are sandblasted to create “fossils.” Returning a natural material to its original state is a further reminder that resources are limited. FOSSILS EXPOSED sets the educational value of recycling, while introducing the notion of permanence and preservation in a modern world through art.
The material for this project was donated by Conti and Sons, San Diego
