The Oregonian, July 5, 2001
Catherine Trevison
Tamsie Ringler is spying on her art from a coffee shop across the street.
A family parks a stroller next to the bronze coffee table and checks out the bronze television, with a Milky Way of blue-and-white glass inside. A mother and her toddler share a peanut butter-and-jelly picnic on the edge of a mosaic tiled with berry fields, jazz, the east wind and Mount Hood. A teen drops her backpack on the concrete couch and hoists her feet to the coffee table, then to the 'cushion,' before opening a book and starting to read.
"All right!" Ringler cheers as the teen gets comfortable. Two years and more than $30,000 after she started building Tri-Met's first public art project on the eastside light-rail line, it is "working as it was intended to," she said.
Through the sculpture, called "Living Room," Ringler means to bring people together and symbolize homecoming to those using light rail, buses and the Tri-Met garage nearby. She involved the public early by inviting Mt. Hood Community College students and others to help design the mosaic, and community volunteers to piece it together.
The project wasn't easy. Ringler, an instructor at Mt. Hood Community College, suffered through illness and technical problems as she transformed real living room furniture into bronze, concrete and glass. Although Tri-Met paid $25,000 for the project, Ringler estimates she put about $6,000 of her money into the project as well.
Now Ringler is headed to the Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota to work on "something silly and fun and kind of political," she said. Her submission, of two rusted cars having sex and producing a ball of toy cars, is meant to be a comment on overpopulation.