2. Mike Wsol, Lost Horizon #2

“Atmosphere meeting land at the horizon provides a feeling of place—a sense of exact yet unknown coordinates, a point on an infinite spherical surface. Vast relative flatness offers a view of the sky that reveals the size of the globe and a person’s physical relationship to it.

With my Lost Horizon sculptures, I created a point of isolation and insulation that affords viewers an opportunity to focus on space, landscape, and self. This experience shows how we inhabit the atmosphere with our entire bodies while small parts of us touch the landscape.

This sculpture has an industrial form that is not out of place with the variety of implements, oil rigs, and other machines found in the landscape. Upon closer inspection, the viewer will recognize an entrance that allows access to the interior. Inside, the viewer can stand to raise his or her viewpoint into the green faux-grass-lined funnel. This space insulates sound and focuses the perspective from interior to surface to sky.

Sculpture or architecture can be designed to provide moments of introspection—moments that reveal to the viewer what it is to be a human moving through the atmosphere touching the earth’s surface.”  Mike Wsol, Lilburn, Georgia, first place winner