Seneca As Art

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To a pilot just about any airplane is “art” but an Anchorage artist is expressing that feeling in a, uh, pivotal way. Paolo Pivi’s How I Roll is a 1977 Piper Seneca mounted between steel posts from the wingtips in the Doris C. Freedman Plaza just off Fifth Avenue in New York’s Central Park. The aircraft rotates slowly on its motorized mounts and will be tumbling there until Aug. 26. The work, according to NYC-Arts, is an example of her “recontextualization of familiar subjects, objects and places.” It’s sponsored by New York’s Public Art Fund. The Seneca is no scrap yard relic. It looks like it could fly off its stand and, according to the FAA registry, it appears it could.

The aircraft has a valid certificate and is registered to a Delaware company, Euro Air Consultants, which also has associations with companies in Florida. How it got to its dizzying perch and what will happen to it when its job of bemusing the tourists and locals at the entrance to the park hasn’t been discussed in the media accounts of the installation. But for two months it will continue creating “the striking and surreal experience of a familiar object seen in an unexpected place doing a very unfamiliar thing.”

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