Jamesville Quarry Sculpture, New York

Located in an unused corner of the massive Jamesville Quarry in upstate New York, this sculpture was never completed, and has been untouched since 1986. The environment surrounding the piece resembles the erosional canyons of the Southwest in form and scale, but was made instead by human hands and machines, removing the beds of limestone to make cement and aggregate. The intervening years have hardly altered the piece, as human erosion has been virtually non-existent in the restricted-access quarry. Much of the displaced rock on the fringes of the wedge-shaped sculpture is just where it was left when the last stone was moved by William Bennett, the artist who began work on it in 1976. Work slowed to occasional summer visits starting in 1979, when Bennett moved away from the area. He hopes to return to work on the piece in the future, but no longer plans to make the large inverted pyramid form, which was originally intended as the target for the alignment of the existing wedge. Visitors were meant to walk into the piece starting at the shallow end, following the eight inch wide path (the keel of the wedge), for eighty or so feet to the end, at which point the visitor would be six feet under the surface level, facing a stone wall. Turning around to exit, the viewer looks straight down the wedge, outward at a distant target, like a gunsight. A kind of optical instrument, the sculpture looks both inward, into the rock, and outward, into the space of the quarry; a microscope on one end and telescope on the other.