Siegfried & Roy Park art installation to adorn southern end of Maryland Parkway

Passers-by on the corner of Maryland Parkway and Russell Road could be forgiven for staring and having a few questions on the morning of Oct. 20 as a 26-foot-tall abstract shape wrapped in white cloth was lifted into the air by a huge crane.

“What is it?” shouted the passenger of one car to the men in hard hats installing the piece.

“It’s art,” the installer shouted back.

“Yeah, but what is it?” came the reply from the car.

Several hundred feet away, Wayne Littlejohn, the artist of the piece titled “Dream Machine,” declined to shout back an explanation of several decades’ worth of artistic development and nearly two years of planning and construction. The light was about to change and, anyway, he didn’t have a traffic light-length explanation.

“We really wanted this to be the crowning piece on the southern entry to Maryland Parkway,” said Michael Ogilvie, public art cultural specialist for Clark County. “We hope there’s going to be a lot more art on Maryland Parkway in the next five to 10 years.”

There were 33 applicants for the project, which were pared down to three semi-finalists. All three presented their proposals, and the review panel chose Littlejohn’s proposal, as it scored highest in artistic integrity, quality, community interaction and project management.

The piece was installed in two sections starting with a tall upright piece and followed by capping it with a large amorphous flattened disk. Although it looks precariously balanced, it is engineered to withstand 110 mph winds.

“He has a fascination with dust devils, spirals and drones,” Ogilvie said. This is a marriage of those ideas.

Littlejohn elaborated that the abstract work was based off the geological and technological forces that create the landscape in Southern Nevada and that it also loosely referenced atomic history and aeronautical engineering. Because it is going up in Siegfried & Roy Park, 5590 Wilbur St., he wanted to reference magic in the work also.

While the piece was installed, the artist paced around the site, taking pictures and waving instructions.

“Today is the culmination of a project that started last January when I put in a proposal for this project,” Littlejohn said. “It really started in earnest with concept drawings and a small-scale version of the piece.”

The work is the largest public art project that a local artist has completed. After creating a scale maquette of the final piece, he then created a full-sized model of plastic foam finished off with a coating to create the smooth, polished metal look of the final piece. He couldn’t find a local company to take it to the next step, so he contacted Tempe, Ariz.-based Bollinger Atelier, a company that specializes in the construction and installation of monumental art. It created molds and began fabricating the final piece in metal.

“I worked on the Styrofoam model both here and in Tempe,” Littlejohn said. “Arizona became like a second home to me. I finished some of it there, and some pieces I hauled back and finished in my backyard.”

Littlejohn and Ogilvie also attended a lot of meetings and worked through logistics to bring the piece to fruition. There were meetings to work out the structural engineering, the architectural design, the landscape design, and more.

“We probably went to 200 or so meetings before we got it finalized,” Ogilvie said. “It went pretty smoothly. Everybody that we’ve worked with has been real positive about it, which is a great thing. It doesn’t always work out that way.”

The installation took over four hours. Once the structure was upright and the two pieces were attached, installers spent an hour or so checking wiring and installing plates the had been removed for transportation. The completed project will including internal lighting elements. The final part of the installation was cutting and removing the white fabric covering revealing the painted metal sculpture beneath.

“A lot of us are seeing this for the first time put together and in color,” Littlejohn said. “I’m really happy with the final piece.”

Landscaping elements for several hundred feet around the base of the sculpture are set to mirror and enhance elements of the sculpture itself, making the landscaping, in many ways, a part of the sculpture. County officials said that the sculpture will be dedicated after the park is completed in December. The 20-acre park will include a walking path, two tennis courts, a splash pad and a range of playground equipment suitable for toddlers through pre-teens.

To reach East Valley View reporter F. Andrew Taylor, email ataylor@viewnews.com or call 702-380-4532.