The golden era of travel is captured in sculpture gracefully floating 25-30 feet above the center of the parking garage atrium. The work spans 56 feet long and 35 feet wide and is suspended by stainless steel cables wired to two, 40-foot long trusses. The trusses are anchored to columns in the parking garage. Each bird, weighing 50 pounds with a wingspan of six feet, is fitted with a wooden frame for stability and gently sways with the motion of air and vibration from the garage.
Dittman is a former Southwest Airlines employee who imagined the project ever since the garage opened in 2003. He has been collecting vintage suitcases during his 19-year career with Southwest. His collection is approaching 100 pieces of first production luggage with steam-bent poplar plywood frames and silk lining.
“Dunne proposed the idea to the Airport Authority several years ago,” said Teresa Damiano, director of marketing and project manager of the art installation. “He was so enthusiastic and passionate about his vision that we asked him to create a prototype and work with our engineering consultants to develop a way to hang it.”
The proposal, along with a watercolor painting of the design and the prototype, was presented to Board members of the Airport Authority’s art committee two years ago. The $56,000 project was funded last year and installation completed in April.
Dittman recently retired from Southwest to further pursue his art career. The RDU project is not the artist’s first work with a transportation theme. Watercolor and oil paintings of vintage cars are commissioned by individuals and are on display in galleries in the Raleigh-Durham region.
The RDU project, however, is his first large scale public art piece.
“Each bird does have its own personality to me. Each has a number and parts are numbered. While I did not name them, I do remember that bird number 4 was cantankerous and hard to put together. Each is a little different in shape, size, coloring and temperament,” he said.
Dittman’s artistic abilities are inherited. His late father, a NASA life scientist and artist based in Texas, carved elaborate wildlife scenes on full-leather hides for wall murals. The younger Dittman traveled with his father — learning the craft of transforming images in the environment into art.
“I’ve always been an artist as a painter. Everything has a realism to me and it has been hard to get into abstract art. This work is my first break into surrealism,” said Dittman. “I’ve always been able to incorporate mechanical realism in my art. I like the contrasts of the mechanical with softer elements.”
While working with the airlines, a few pieces of luggage would come through with travel stickers telling a story of where they’ve been, said Dittman. “I was fascinated by the story each label told and started looking at every antique luggage label I could find and thinking of how I could combine stickers with my art and my luggage collection. Also, I used to do large geese in full wood carvings. I like the drama of the full size goose and wanted to continue the large bird flying overhead. Suddenly the idea emerged to combine the geese with the suitcases and stickers.”
The project involved many hours of methodical labor. The first step was to take woodcarver drawings of Canadian Geese and have them rendered in a computer aided design drawing. The rendering was next taken to a fabricator to cut the pattern of the geese on stainless steel. Separately, each suitcase was fitted with a wooden frame and a dust cover “too keep pigeons out,” said Dittman. The steel process was mechanical and the suitcases still had a handmade element to the production process, making it a challenge to match the two components for a perfect fit.
Once the stainless pieces were cut and the suitcases prepared, each of the birds was assembled only to be numbered and taken apart in order to apply a clear-coat finish and stickers. “I wanted to apply the stickers the way they were actually done which was to shellac the back and the front of the paper image to seal it from the rain.” Dittman wants his work to migrate and lead to adaptations of the theme for transportation terminals.
At RDU the work stands as a monument for a time long gone, when travel was glamorous but available only to a select few. At the same time it symbolizes the increased accessibility modern age air travel brings with the masses now flying with the ease of a flock of geese.
Perhaps the golden age of travel is not gone, but according to Dittman, it simply took the “Earlier Flight.”
|
