SFMOMA Artists Gallery installed

Yesterday I installed 22 pieces at SFMOMA Artists Gallery at Fort Mason. They are all from the Target series, ie. unrolled & rerolled paper dartboards. Almost all of the ones in this show are brand new. The opening is on June 7th. Here are some dartboards in my studio waiting to be unwound:
And here are some shots from yesterday:

Sewage Signage

There is some excellent signage at the waste treatment plant. Some merely suggestive, as if Traci Lords or Charlton Heston was just about to walk around the corner of one of these concrete tanks.


Other signage is a little more screwball, a little more existential:


And my favorite sign is one which goes a long way towards explaining some of the more difficult days I've had:

Cool Stuff at Sewage Plant

There's a lot of cool things at & around the waste treatment plant. These "de-misters" have that funky early 50s sci-fi thing going for them:


Outside the rear gate there's a crowd of mallards that collects in the late afternoon to plop their duck butts on the sun-warmed asphalt road:


And I finally found out where all this "DSL" stuff goes when it leaves your computer. Next time you have connectivity problems, it's probably because your email attachment couldn't make these sharp right-angle turns:

Scum-Skimmers

For the last couple weeks I've been managing another project for Berkeley Engineering. This time we replaced three scum-skimmers. Yes that's what they are called & that is what they do, they rotate and skim the top of a tank of sewage, knocking the floaters over the edge of a steel "beach" plate and into a trench that gets drained out every hour. Here's one of the old steel scum-skimmers after we removed it:


Every step of this project was a pain in the ass; nothing but problems of one sort or another. But we finally got it all finished. Here's a plastic collar that we had to fabricate because the original was too thick to fit:


One of the original shafts had been misaligned when it was installed in 1978. We had to correct the alignment when we installed the new shaft. Here's Bernie finding the new location of the center of shaft:


Here we are lowering the largest new skimmer shaft into place:


Here it is installed, with one of the shorter shafts sitting next to it. Note that these aren't steel like the old ones; these are fiberglass with stainless steel stubs at each end. Even so, they weight about 500 lbs each.


Once the shafts are lowered into position, all the bearings, fittings, gears & chains etc. have to be installed & tinkered with:


We're finally finished & now I just have to meet with the engineer who is managing the project for the client. I'm really glad it's over.