This image will not be on display at any of my future art fairs. It draws too much negative attention.
I made the image when I came across a pile of retired turbine blades piled near the Elsworth exit along a Interstate 35. The repeating shapes intrigued me. They also drew art show visitors into my tent throughout 2023. At each event, I had to explain what they were and what they weren’t. Recylable. The technology to make them light and strong also made them practically impossible to recycle.
By the middle of last summer, one visitor told me a company in Louisiana (Missouri) has started recycling the pieces. He also told me another company was “making money hand-over-fist dumping them into a canyon” near Casper, Wyoming. It ends up that they were burying them. That same conversation came up whenever someone asked about the image. A lot of people knew the empty promises of wind turbines.
By naming the piece “Empty Promises”, I clearly communicated my disappointment with the technology when I found out why they were piled up along that interstate. At first, I had no problem talking about the turbines, getting visitor’s views and experiences with the giants that dot the Iowa landscape. The piece is also part of my “Still Standing” exhibit, but I never anticipated that it would dominate art fair conversations the way it has.
In an art fair environment, it detracts from the stories behind my other work. It brings people down, and keeps them from considering the majestic Chariton grain elevator that a local man is making plans to use as the backdrop to a new gathering space and food truck stop. When they see the turbines, they can’t see Sprung #2 and fondly remember sleeping on old exposed box springs. When they’re angry at empty promises, they aren’t in the right mindset to smile knowingly at the lone cow on a hill, silhouetted against a golden Iowa sunset.
One role of art is to stir up conversations, but those aren’t the conversations I enjoy having at art fairs. How about you? What experiences do you expect at an art fair?