Power Flower
Photograph by Gabe Kirchheimer
Art car? More like art crane. Burning Man attendees and bungee cords to pull slightly inward, giving the
last year greeted the return of an 80-foot Flower and stem organic-looking curves between its nubby joints.
a new Venus Flytrap with awe, laughter, even tears. At the base, a 20-foot square platform, complete
The freewheeling flora — a dream of mechanical with roots, leaves, and smaller flowers, supports
designer Patrick Shearn — are really JGL 800AJ a sound system and crucially protects the adoring
boom lifts fitted with fantasy costumes that hide public from the chassis, wheels, and 17 tons of moving,
and soften their true nature. They are the work of pinching machinery. For Shearn, who served as a
artist and lighting designer Josh Flemming, plus mechanical designer and puppeteer for the movie
more than 30 people from Los Angeles art space Jurassic Park, this was the most difficult task. “You’re
Abundant Sugar and artist collective the Do LaB. talking about all this weight rotating, and if [the
In development, the crew often built and rebuilt by deck] did crash for some reason into the wheels
trial and error to tailor their high aesthetic expecta- or into the chassis below, it would have been pretty
tions to the vehicles’ mechanical needs. “We would catastrophic. A lot of broken wood and potentially
move the lift and it would crush some of the parts; people getting hurt.”
then it was back to the drawing board,” explain Josh A team effort from beginning to end, the crew
and brother Jesse, co-founders of the Do LaB. dedicated five people communicating on radios
The lifts have plenty of crunch points to cope with. to steer each art crane safely, a commitment that
Taking advantage of the 800AJ’s articulated boom, paid off. “I think we devoured a bicycle or two in our
the head of the Flower rotates and tilts anthropo- journeys,” says Shearn, “but that’s about it.”
morphically and its 24-foot array of LED-lit petals —Eric Smillie
opens and closes. To accommodate the telescoping
arm, elastic fabric stretches over fitted plywood discs >> The Flower: tribes.tribe.net/theflower
