EDELSTEIN SCULPTURE : SURF’S UP ON SANTA MONICA MALL

“There’s a charge to doing large sculpture, a grandeur in building something bigger than us.” Barbara Edelstein beamed like a kid with a wonderful new toy as she talked about her two corrugated steel sculptures.

The undulating sheets of silvery, rippling metal--one spiraling into an eight-foot vertical column, the other curling horizontally like a wave--have turned an old pair of reflecting pools into bases for a complementary couple of fountains in Santa Monica’s Third Street Mall.

“Romantic Notations: Wave/East Wind,” Edelstein’s two-part sculpture combining industrial materials with natural elements of reflected light and water, will be dedicated today at 5:30 p.m. by the Third Street Development Corp., the City of Santa Monica and the Foundation for Art Resources. Her work will remain on the mall through May 14, as the first step in a tentative plan to enliven the walkway with outdoor art.

“I love the drama of these two pieces playing off each other,” Edelstein said as plumbing was adjusted to allow water to flow from holes in pipes over the ridged surfaces of the metal. “I think of them as ‘He’ and ‘She.’ The tall piece--the more masculine, dynamic one--was named ‘East Wind’ because that’s the wind direction most favored by surfers for the best waves. The feminine ‘Wave’ has a gentler rhythm and it really looks like a wave, though I didn’t start with that idea. The images came from working with the material.

“The sculpture is very abstract but it has a story--for me. I had been thinking about romance and the romantic sound of water. When the material suggested wave shapes it seemed connected to the ocean, but when water runs across the corrugated metal it also reminded me of rain on tin rooftops. Everyone knows that sound and this material, but the sculpture transcends what we know about them.”

At 30, Edelstein is literally making a public splash less than a year after getting a master of fine arts degree from the Claremont Graduate School, where she created a corrugated steel indoor environment for her master’s exhibition. If her Santa Monica sculpture marks the beginning of hoped-for involvement in large-scale outdoor art, it is also the culmination of a youthful life in art.

She was born into a family of artists--”art materials were always available, and we just made things.” Her father, Sy Edelstein, is a photographer and graphic designer; her mother, Jean, is a painter, currently having a show at the Ruth Bachofner Gallery; her brother, Bruce, is a painter and sculptor now living in New York.

Initially infatuated with biology and dance, Barbara Edelstein eventually concentrated on art when she discovered how unhappy she was without it. During her undergraduate training at UC Santa Cruz and a five-year period before enrolling at Claremont, she worked with fiber sculpture and later shifted to corrugated cardboard as a means for building models of works to be made in metal.

“It was a natural progression,” she said. “I’ve always been drawn to linear, tactile things. When I made paintings in college, I put sand and other materials in them. Antoni Tapies, Agnes Martin and Japanese gardens were strong influences on me--as was the book ‘Zen and the Art of Archery’; it talks about archery as a way to Zen. I’ve always liked to explore art and concepts through one material.”

Edelstein’s early interest in dance has resurfaced in her sculpture, which she thinks has choreographic aspects: “It’s more than just a vision. There’s body awareness--the movement of people through space--and sound. That’s part of the fun of it.”

The Santa Monica sculpture was fabricated by B.H. Tank Works after Cliff Benjamin, co-director of Fine Art Resources (a nonprofit organization that sponsors local art projects), asked Edelstein to submit sculpture proposals for three locations. One of them, the reflecting pools on the mall, immediately appealed to her.

“I always wanted to play with water and this material,” she said, “and I’m very interested in the history of public fountains. First there were watering holes and wells, then fountains became the central meeting places of towns and plazas. They aren’t functional anymore as sources of water, but fountains are still social magnets and they’re still romantic.

“When I presented the idea to the Third Street Development Corp., they loved it. And when they suggested unveiling it on Valentine’s Day, I decided it had to be.”