ANAHEIM : Arena Sports Grecian-Theme Sculpture

“The Anamorph,” a 20-foot-high fiberglass and glass column, was unveiled Thursday as The Pond’s newest public art commission.

The $200,000 sculpture in the plaza of the sports arena was created by artists Richard Turner, Michael Davis and Ann Preston.

The column is encircled by a basin lined with mosaic images of athletes and dancing sea nymphs borrowed from ancient Greek art. It is based on a Renaissance perceptual game known as anamorphosis, in which seemingly distorted images suddenly make sense when viewed in a special mirror. In this piece, the stretched-out mosaic figures are reflected in proper proportion on the shiny surface of the column.

The Pond’s $600,000 art program was funded in 1991 with 1% of the construction budget. The arena’s first public art commission was “Video Arch,” by internationally known video artist Nam June Paik, installed in the south lobby in June, 1993. That piece consists of 106 TV monitors forming a 13-foot archway that flashes patterns of imagery orchestrated by videodiscs.

The City Council and the Citizen’s Art Advisory Committee selected “The Anamorph” in September, 1993, from designs submitted by 18 artists. They were chosen from a pool of 85 Southern California artists invited by a panel of art professionals. Turner, who lives in Orange, is a professor in Chapman University’s art department and director of the campus’s Guggenheim Gallery. Davis, a Cal State Fullerton graduate who has been making public art for two decades, is co-designer of the Sunset/Vermont station of the Metro Red Line. Preston, who holds a master of fine arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts, has made artwork for the Los Angeles Public Library and the Willow station of the Metro Blue Line.