Rebecca and the Crane

It was an aerial adventure of epic proportions.

It began when the crane was installed in the huge crater out of which – with the crane’s aid- would rise the handsome ART Condos building.

As ART Condos Developer Gary Silverberg and long time friend, artist-writer Gary Michael Dault, stood gazing upon the crane one day, Silverberg suddenly announced that it would be great to DO something beautiful on the crane. “Do Something?”, asked Dault. “Yes” said Silverberg. “It’d be good to put up something simple on the crane, some statement or configuration that would sort of mark the neighbourhood!”.

There was a short silence. The crane loomed high overhead. Both had the same thought – or non-thought: you can’t really do much to a crane.

“Why don’t we just put the word “ART” on it?”, Dault suggested. “With the letters made to light up you’d see it from all over at night.”

And so it was decided.

It was decided that the letters A, R, T would be a simple and effective and uncluttered way to announce both the building’s location and construction progress. The word ART would shine like a beacon over the neighbourhood.

The light wrangling somehow fell to Rebecca Daniels, resourceful Executive Assistant to ART Condos Developer, Gary Silverberg.

It was felt that the best lights for the job would be LED rope lights –  basically heavy-duty Christmas tree lights. Then there was the question of their colour. Red seemed needlessly aggressive – like stop signs and exit signs. Yellow is hard to read at a distance, and, besides, yellow seemed a little wimpy. Green would have been more ecological than strictly necessary. Blue was the obvious choice. A good strong, saturated blue -as blue as the sky, as blue as the sea.

But what kind of blue?

There are a lot of different blue bulbs out there, but the right blue turned out to be called “Vibrant Blue,” a not very imaginative name, but one, we hoped, that would live up to the chromatic excitement it seemed to promise.

And so Rebecca Daniels became curator of the ART Condos crane-lights.

It soon became clear that a single strand of lights might not provide enough sizzling blue to carry the word ART over any distance. The only thing to do, as Daniels saw it, was to shape the strands of bulbs into the three big letters and try the scheme out—by laying the letters on the ground.

Arranging the strands of lights on the patch of open ground between the ART Condos sales trailer and the construction trailer nearby, she proceeded to form a big A and R and T, using what she terms “a few homemade processes” in so doing. In order to be able to plug the strands in and get them to light up, for example, she connected them with additional strings of the same lights.

But then she had to mask out these hastily arranged connecting strands. “I used some articles of black clothing I found in the trailer,” she says, “and many, many black garbage bags.” Then she clambered up onto the roofs of both trailers, in order to see if the strands said “ART” in any convincing way. That’s when she made the beautiful photographs that are reproduced here.

Once it was decided that the light-strands would indeed proclaim the hallowed word forcefully enough, the next step was to get them installed on the crane.

The construction crane is 236 feet high—up to the horizontal boom. Daniels climbed the crane, all of its 236 feet, and was up there for four hours. “Admittedly, after the first hour, the novelty sort of wore off,” she says.

She had a professional crane-climber with her, she adds. Her role, so dizzyingly far above the excavation, was to “art-direct the installation.” Which means she had to inform the climber-installer about which part of which letters seemed to require more tightening with the heavy-duty zip ties that bound them to the skeleton of the crane, or when, say, part of a letter—like the cross-bar of the “T”—needed adjusting to make it more horizontal, etc.. That kind of thing.

“It was all part of the learning curve,” says Daniels cheerfully. “Plus,” she adds, “if anyone ever wants me to fasten Christmas tree lights to a crane, I’m an expert!”