Reality Check
Photos by Mike Hall
Reality Check
During the Christmas holiday season, some towns install life-like carolers near or at normal size of humans. That’s good, but by January, they are gone. In Carmel, Indiana in the art district, three similar statues in size are permanent. They are not war heroes mounted on cement pedestals, or important community leaders in monochromatic bronze sitting at eye level.
These three figures are everyday people created in 2006 by J. Seward Johnson for the Sculpture Foundation , include a woman with a bag of groceries, a man reading a newspaper while resting on a bench, and a child watering a patch of real flowers. Well away from car traffic, these colorful statues on the sidewalk could be real people, except that the woman will never get to her car or walk home, the man will never finish reading the same paper over and over, and the child will never finish his care of the flowers. They are merely obstacles to avoid to oblivious pedestrians, but there is more who wonder and have a reality check.
Unlike their seasonal cousins, these permanent people could have real feelings. Do they get cold in the snow or hot in the summer sun? Could they see what is going on around them or hear the bit and pieces of conversations from the humans that pass them? At night do they come to life and move around the area only to become the standard pose in the light?
Perhaps they are made with sensors that can “see” and ”hear” for real with radio frequency monitors relaying the information to someone in a the back of some store in the area? Could they really come to life at some point? Carry this questioning to other “real” things and discoveries are made. People learn that the earth revolves around the sun, and that it is possible to go to the moon and come back. People live beneath the water in nuclear submarines. There are questions that need to be asked to create a reality check.