Why There Are Tire Tracks All Over Olympic Sculpture Park

SEATTLE, WA — Wondering why there are tire tracks painted all over Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park? It's a new installation by a Brazilian artist that comes as downtown Seattle's downtown streets are being reshaped.

The installation by Regina Silveira called "Octopus Wrap" was inspired by the sculpture park's location near several busy intersections, including Western and Elliott avenues. But just a few blocks away, crews are tearing down the old Alaskan Way Viaduct. That will eventually make way for redevelopment of the waterfront and Alaskan Way, which will be as wide as eight lanes near Colman Dock.

Just a few blocks east of the sculpture park, crews are busy reconnecting the road network between South Lake Union and the Seattle Center after the completion of the new SR 99 tunnel.

"Octupus Wrap" aims to "upends the viewer’s perception of a well-known space," according to SAM — just like the real infrastructure going on nearby.

Here's more from a SAM press release:

"SAM’s Olympic Sculpture Park presents Regina Silveira: Octopus Wrap (May 11, 2019–March 8, 2020), a new site-specific installation for the PACCAR Pavilion. Inspired by the park’s location at the intersection of several busy thoroughfares, Octopus Wrap envelops the building’s walls in a mind-bending tire track pattern that questions our perception of reality. This is the first time the internationally celebrated artist has shown work in Seattle.

"Brazilian artist Regina Silveira is renowned for her illusionistic interventions on buildings, city streets, and public parks. These surreal disruptions of public spaces have included exaggerated shadows, swarms of insects, dense clusters of footprints, and nocturnal light projections of animal tracks wandering across building façades. Silveira started her career in the 1950s and has become one of the country’s most revered artists, creating works that investigate the representation of reality and the power of art to transform.

"For this installation, Silveira has wrapped the PACCAR Pavilion’s floor, walls, and windows in an improbable pattern of overlapping tire tracks that from a distance recall the arms of an octopus. The installation resolves on the building’s interior mural wall in five toy motorcycles driven by five tiny drivers. Taking the park’s location—zigzagging around busy city streets, railroad tracks, and waterways—as inspiration,Octopus Wrap upends the viewer’s perception of a well-known space, disrupting its austerity with boisterous visual noise.

“Silveira is an extraordinary artist who has inspired several generations of artists in Brazil,” says Catharina Manchanda, SAM’s Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Contemporary Art. “Her artistic gesture is political in the sense that she aims to disrupt the familiar. Irreverent and fantastical, her immersive installation is like a noisy parade that stops us in our tracks.”