The ‘Whale Tails’ in South Burlington’s Technology Park have a new neighbor: central Vermont sculptor Christopher Curtis‘ monumental stainless steel “That Place in the Stars,” which will be on view through the spring.
The new sculpture is tucked beside the OnLogic building, visible from the highway but farther away. It’s shiny and pointy, a 24-foot-high vertical swoop intersected by an elegantly curving, 21-foot-wide arch, with a space-age aesthetic. On the frigid bluebird January day Curtis installed the work, seeing it was like visiting a sculpture park on the moon.
Curtis has created works in stone and metal for decades; many have appeared over the years in the annual “Exposed” show of outdoor sculpture in Stowe, which he cofounded in 1992. But “That Place in the Stars” is his largest yet.
He started thinking about the work five years ago, he said, when he was playing with two pieces of glass in his Duxbury studio and noticed the interactions between their curved edges. Soon, Curtis was drawing versions of the sculpture in CAD design software.
“The beauty about that is, these mathematical shapes — these curves — are defined, you know, mathematically,” he said. “That’s why they’re so smooth.”
CAD also facilitates 3D printing, an easy way to make small maquettes of his sculptures, which he uses to refine the final design. The sculpture at Technology Park is the second in an edition of three; the first iteration of “That Place in the Stars” is in a private collection in Tulsa, Okla.
After building that version in 2022, Curtis toured it from the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe to the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, disassembled on a flatbed truck. The sculpture made pit stops in such locations as the Cincinnati Observatory and the Malcolm W. Martin Memorial Park in St. Louis, where it posed as though for selfies with sculpture-celeb the Gateway Arch.
Curtis and his wife were recently driving to Burlington when she noticed the Whale Tails — or, more properly, Jim Sardonis‘ “Reverence” — and thought it would be a great, clearly visible spot for “That Place in the Stars.” Curtis approached John Illick of ReArch, Technology Park’s developer, who purchased “Reverence” for the site in 1999. “There’s this kind of legacy,” Curtis said. “I knew Jim Sardonis right from when he was carving them, back in the ’80s.” Illick connected Curtis with OnLogic, which owns the site, and company personnel were enthusiastic about hosting a second piece of art, Curtis said.
“That Place in the Stars” is sleek and high-tech, while the Whale Tails are natural and comfortingly chonky, yet the two sculptures have more similarities than you’d think. The mast of “Stars” twists as it curves gently upward, like a spine; its downward arch echoes the shape of a whale’s tail fin. Each work was created with a different site in mind, but both are arresting in this odd, drive-by landscape.
As Curtis whacked at icy bolts with a wrench during installation, his sculpture resonated like a gong. Up close, tiny grinder marks show where the piece was welded together; a viewer has a real sense of its materiality and the artisanry of its construction, as well as its techie origins. Though the sculpture invites viewers to imagine what Curtis called a “mythic place,” its physical details reframe any location as somewhere stellar — even a frozen office park by the highway.
“That Place in the Stars” by Christopher Curtis, installed through the spring at OnLogic in South Burlington. christophercurtis.com
The original print version of this article was headlined “Highway to the Stars: New Sculpture Lifts Off in South Burlington”
This article appears in Jan 29 – Feb 4, 2025.
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