InSITE STL
InSITE STL is a group of site-specific, temporary public artworks in Downtown St. Louis in 2022. The works, developed by St. Louis-based artists, impact how we see Downtown — from the actual physical character, to different views and sightlines, to our views and perceptions of what Downtown is and can be. The artworks encourage exploration, curiosity, and a new way of seeing.
InSITE STL will welcome visitors to St. Louis, encourage exploration of its streets and public spaces, and highlight Downtown as a place for creativity and possibility. Each of the five works of art will engage viewers in a different experience, from murals in public spaces to light-filled activations to sculptures that explore light, movement, and space. Artwork will be installed throughout 2022.
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InSITE STL Artists
The following artists are part of InSITE STL.
Balk is a public artist whose work centers on mathematics and data visualization. What’s Your Number, is a vinyl mural-like installation that will visualize data about the quantity of time that survey respondents spend on their mobile devices. The proposed location of What’s Your Number is a Downtown skyway, and the installation will be visible from the street below, offering an engaging experience for people inside the skyway, on the street and in the surrounding businesses and residences.
Murphy is a social entrepreneur with a broad artistic practice that encompasses community arts, interactive installations, sculpture, and design. Through a combination of installation, design, performance, and audience participation, The Department Co. will explore new and alternative possibilities for commerce and community in Downtown St. Louis. Murphy’s project will transform storefront windows into illustrative murals that will serve as the backdrop for pop-up events designed to engage pedestrians to create functional items from reclaimed materials. Through these interactions and further digital engagement, Murphy’s piece aims to shed light on a future in which community members play an active role in defining and creating culture in St. Louis.
Portlock’s work combines special-effects software and the visual conventions of 19th-century American painting to creatively interact with contemporary cityscapes. Beginning in October 2020, Portlock will project a series of multi-story scaled animations on buildings in Downtown St. Louis. The subject matter for each animation will be the obscured history of each building, carefully researched through local archives to share the building’s significance to the city. The projections will be scaled and created to highlight the specific architecture of the surface.
Stanley, a sculptor, focuses on temporary site-responsive installations that explore the dynamics between collapse and construction, tension and balance, and refinement and rawness. Ribbons of Light is a site-specific sculpture made of LEDs that cascade down a building. The multicolored light sculpture will merge and juxtapose with the surrounding urban fabric and utilize the specific architectural details of the site to reward viewers in multiple vantage points. The long lines of light will be reminiscent of jellyfish tentacles, and Stanley hopes that by breaking with the rigid grid of the city, Ribbons of Light will spark a sense of curiosity in those who view the work.
Kelley Van Dyck and Jonathan Murphy engage in built and speculative projects that explore ideas of focused contextuality, materially driven form, and projected space. Sine Screen is a digitally designed and fabricated exploration of architectural ornament in the form of a 3D printed masonry screen wall. The project will explore the role of emerging digital technologies with an understanding of the methods humans have been constructing buildings for millennia. Created in sustainable, locally sourced clay, the sculpted form of the units and aggregated system produce patterns of light and shadow, textural fields, and novel optical effects around the sculpture.