Kai Vierstra - Earthquake with Large Fissure
Video of similar piece showing plywood being stressed and cracks forming:
[Quicktime .mov] - dead link, try the vimeo
[jpeg and video review--haven't seen the actual work] The slow cracking of the wood in the video is aesthetically satisfying, like the popping of bubble wrap, but ominous. I like the piece's encapsulation of horrific forces into almost-pure form. The shape seems to have been determined entirely by factors other than the artist's design: an imagined civic architect's ideal plans twisted and rended by catastrophe "in the field." It's straight-up entropy--once broken the structural integrity is gone. Compare Steve Parrino's bashed-in monochromes and Jason Middlebrook's post-apocalyptic Bilbao. Or Gehry if all the "implied torque" in his buildings actually tore them apart.