Artists Sasha Primo and Romeo Sosa of Buenos Aires are in Oakley, hammering large iron boxes into an elaborate rock formation.
The two men won the bid put out by The Arts Council Of Park City + Summit County for a public art installation in Coalville. Now, they’re halfway through their roughly three-week timeline.
Their project is part sculpture, part furniture, part interactive art.
They’re creating a metal seating area inspired by Coalville’s rock ledges and petroglyphs to be installed, appropriately, outside the Ledges Event Center near Summit County’s fairgrounds.
For Sosa, it’s his first time creating art in Utah. The project combines some of his specialities, like sculpture and furniture fabrication.
“I’ve done furniture design, some kinds of different materials, some sculpture, painting, ceramics, pottery,” Sosa said. “I'm really curious.”
Primo brings the Utah connection, having interviewed locals for his mural on the Summit County Public Works building in Hoytsville last year, And Romeo brings to the table his experience with metalwork.
“Romeo has had some experiences in this kind of crashing effect, but smaller pieces for furniture,” Primo said. “So it's our first time going bigger, and this is kind of like a big experiment that we're working on.”
The “crashing effect” is how they’re turning metal into rock formations.
Step one was to purchase rectangular iron sheets in Salt Lake City and weld them into boxes. Step two is molding the iron boxes with brute force, using a skid-steer provided by former Arts Council president Katherine Scott.
Scott originally met Primo when he created the Hoytsville mural. She has let him, Sosa and their videographer Nico Castillo stay in a cabin on her ranch in Oakley while they create the sculpture.
“My farrier, my horseshoer, lent him a welder,” Scott said. “So we were just trying to utilize the neighborhood to see what we could find.”
Step three will be painting the metal after molding it into ledges, which Primo says will give the finished product a softer feel.
“We’re having these boxes all kind of organically crushed to resemble these morphologies,” Primo said. “So in the end, they're going to be super soft, because we're going to paint them, but they're going to be strong like steel.”
And the metal material allows for the sculpture’s most unique quality: step four, which is creating magnetic “petroglyphs” with the community.
Primo and Sosa held a workshop July 29 at Ledges Event Center to connect with locals and get their input on which symbols should be on the magnets.
They’ll be back at Ledges during the Summit County Fair Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Everyone is invited to meet the artists and help them create the magnetic petroglyphs.
Inspired by the ancient petroglyphs near Chalk Creek, the Arts Council says the magnets will represent Summit County’s “contemporary myths” and stories.
After that, Primo and Sosa have a tight deadline. They want to be done by the end of next week, and the final product could be installed by the end of August.
