I spent the morning with this little guy and a bunch of his buddies.
A co-worker and I spent the first part of today rifling through storage boxes and unwrapping pieces of donated artwork in order to acquire accurate dimensions of individual pieces with the intent of finalizing a design for a custom-built glass display case to house them. These pieces were collected by a local dentist throughout his life and were recently donated to a dental institute to be displayed in the main lobby. There are many sculptures, artifacts, paintings, and glass works in the collection and we needed to sort through the lot to find a few select pieces.
I didn’t mind though. The warehouse reminded me of on Indiana Jones film, and although this single storage building in Brockport, NY wasn’t quite on the scale of the government storage facility depicted at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark I was amazed by the amount of crates and the complex storage system.
The man who helped us un-crate the items was full of interesting stories as well. He has spent his life in the moving and storage business and has discovered all sorts of unusual items. He has been gifted several thousand dollar NFL memorabilia and discarded cook books which, unbeknown to the owner, contained antique paper money within its pages, and has been in the middle of messy divorce separations where he has literally been physically attacked and shot at.
Our crate was in the top row
It wasn’t until we were on our way out that I had actually noticed how many piles of crates were there. We passed a small separation in the piles for a structural support, and this crevice revealed the true depth of the operation.
Now, 3 rows tall by 4 rows deep by...how many columns?
Another sculpture, and Inuit "Hunter with Antler Teeth" from soapstone
This is an Inuit sculpture carved from whalebone.
I will post photos of the finished display cases when they are completed. They feature floating glass shelves in an eight foot back lit resin panel, if the contractor follows the design requirements they should be quite spectacular.
