SEATTLE, WA.- New York artist Jean Shin is working with Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) and its design team to incorporate art at new facilities at the transfer station during Phase II of the project. By referencing the topography of the site before 1966 when the North Transfer Station was built. The work - titled, RECLAIMED - brings the memory of the former landscape to the new Transfer Station plaza.

The artwork expresses these natural forms through the use of industrial materials—10,000 linear feet of rebar that will be reclaimed from the site during the upcoming demolition of the current NTS building. Liberated from the architectural structure, the recycled rebar will form the organic, colorful linear contours of the previously existing landscape into sculptural forms. Additionally colored pathways will cut through the landmasses to create topography through the plaza.

Enlivening the new plaza, the sculptures’ placement and the pathways that are created between them provide active spaces for public engagement. These inviting paths, delineated by bright orange painted lines on the pavement, connect 34th Street to the entrance of the building. Another path between the two tallest sculptures leads to the landscape area, framing an intimate view of the garden.

Together, these sculptures made out of new and repurposed rebar from the site, partnered with the installation of colored lines on the pavement, suggest a close relationship of art, industry, and nature coexisting in the same location. As visitors walk through the plaza, the public is invited to consider the significance of place, its impact on materials and their connection to the environment both past and present. RECLAIMED highlights the potential of waste material to be reimagined into an elegant second life within the community, and echoes the sustainable principle of re-use at the Transfer Station.”

Jean Shin is nationally recognized for her monumental installations that transform everyday objects into elegant expressions of identity and community. For each project, she amasses vast collections of a particular object—prescription pill bottles, sports trophies, sweaters—which are often sourced through donations from individuals in a participating community. These intimate objects then become the materials for her conceptually rich sculptures, videos and site-specific installations. Distinguished by her meticulous, labor-intensive process, and her engagement of community, Shin’s arresting installations reflect individuals’ personal lives as well as collective issues that we face as a society.

Her work has been widely exhibited in major national and international museums, including in solo exhibitions at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona (2010), Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC (2009), the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia (2006), and Projects at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2004).Currently, her work is on view at The Crow Collection in Dallas, TX.

Other venues have been the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Art and Design, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Asia Society and Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, Sculpture Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Frederieke Taylor Gallery in New York City.

Site-specific permanent installations have been commissioned by the US General Services Administration Art in Architecture Award, New York City’s Percent for the Arts and MTA Art for Transit. She has received numerous awards, including the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Architecture/Environmental Structures (2008) and Sculpture (2003), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Art Award. Her works have been featured in many publications, including Frieze Art, Flash Art, Tema Celeste, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, Artnews, and The New York Times.

Born in Seoul, South Korea and raised in the United States, Shin attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1999 and received a BFA and MS from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She lives and works in New York City.