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Read the press release here.

New Public Art Comes to Stapleton's Tappen Park

By Nicholas Rizzi | June 28, 2013 9:07am
 Artist Karlis Rekevics sculpture "All-Too-Familiar Tangle" was unvielied on Thursday, June 27, 2013 in Tappen Park, Stapleton.
All-Too-Familiar Tangle
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STAPLETON — A new piece of public art in Tappen Park aims to capture the neighborhood’s architecture and infrastructure — on a much smaller scale.

Artist Karlis Rekevics’ “All-Too-Familiar Tangle” sculpture officially went on display on Thursday in the Stapleton green space.

The piece is a series of wooden molds connected together that references the urban landscape that people rarely pay attention to, including bridge supports, guardrails and scaffolds, Rekevics said in a release.

Instead of casting objects directly into the statue, Rekevics created the molds from memory.

“While the sculptures take their starting point from real places, they are more about the way that memory and my improvisational process transforms them into a new place with a physical and metaphorical language,” he said in a release.

Rekevics' piece aimed to capture architectural landmarks of the neighborhood, including the wooden bollards on the coast near the Staten Island Ferry and the entryway of the Staten Island Savings Bank at 81 Water St.

Rekevics created the sculptor after winning the Clare Weiss Emerging Artist Award from the city’s Parks Department.

The park was tapped as the beneficiary of the award in October, and was the first park in Staten Island to get the award.

"We are very excited to go to Staten Island," Jennifer Lantzas, public art coordinator for the city's parks department, told DNAinfo New York in October. "Tappen has been one of my favorite parks over here. It has a lot of history that I think artists can expand on."

The award, named after the city’s former public art coordinator, Clare Weiss, who died in 2010 of breast cancer, gives a $10,000 grant to an emerging artist to build an original open-air sculpture, which will stay up for around a year.

The mold for the sculpture was taken off on Thursday. The artwork will be on display up until June 2014.