LEITMOTIF
Mario M. Muller
200’ x 8’6” ten black and white panels & ten colored panels
Artist Mario M. Muller’s charge was to work with the pre-existing format of the Drive-thru’s curved walls and obstructions, playing both with and against the elements, in essence to invigorate a space left unnoticed.
Muller said the colored panels will serve to contrast with the black and white imagery of the silhouettes and shadow figures. “When I saw the length of the piece, I didn’t want to do all figures,” he said. “The colors create a visual rhythm, a motion, to alternate between the other panels. It is something to break them up, like a syncopated rhythm.”
Approximately 80 propellers, varying in sizes from six inches to one foot, cast in linotype and subsequently gold plated, are permanently mounted to the wall in front of both the color and black and white panels. They float throughout the piece like brushstrokes of sculpture in groupings of 10-15. “The propellers have a motion that brings the eye along through the entire piece,” Muller said. “They propel and activate motion, which is apt for the Kentucky Center because it propels the imagination and the mind.”
