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Cleveland, Ohio - CMCN's crew of dedicated art handlers, packers, and conveyers was hired to relocate the outdoor sculpture Urns installed in the outdoor public space in the heart of downtown Cleveland known as "Mall B". After being selected for the 2003 International Call for Artists competition, Brian Tolle created the 2-year, temporary public art sculpture, "For the Gentle Wind Doth Move Silently, Invisibly," on commission by Cleveland Public Art. The sculpture is in honor of the 100th anniversary of architect Daniel Burnham's Group Plan of 1903 for the city of Cleveland. The work is a series of eight, 9-foot sculptural urns that have been machine-milled from high-density Styrofoam[TM], painted and then polyurethane coated. Tolle distorted the urns' traditional Neo-Classical shape, giving them unnatural and impossible forms with no two urns having the same shape. His public art often uses computer technology to rethink the familiar and historical shapes of the projects. This is the case for the Cleveland installation; it uses exact measurements of wind patterns off Lake Erie to employ cutting-edge SOFTIMAGE software, applying affects of the Lake's natural forces on sculptural urns. Brian Tolle worked with the influential Public Art Fund in New York City for two years and is known for his Irish Hunger Memorial in New York's Battery Park City. Tolle has had many solo and group shows across the country as well as in Europe. Quintessentially American, Tolle draws upon influences such as New England's Colonial period and the causes of mass European immigration to the United States, utilizing materials and techniques distinctly modern to celebrate bygone eras in danger of becoming culturally extinct. The carefully crafted juxtaposition of eras has become a calling card of Tolle's, as evidenced by his Battery Park installation, memorializing with painstaking detail a quarter acre of genuine Irish countryside as a tribute to the losses incurred during the Irish Potato Famine. Works such as his Cleveland installation and the one in New York, which a leading art website referred to as "a combination of postmodern monument and landscape", underscore Tolle's commitment to history and the detailed research required to create and design pieces with such accurate touches of antiquity. CM's Fine Arts Division, while in its relative infancy as an operation, handled and treated the work with reverence and respect traditionally reserved for pieces of great age and fragility. Due to the care provided by the CM art team, the Urns work was safely relocated to the artist's studio in Fleischmanns, New York, itself now a small slice of history.
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