Shortest Distance

Sited at street level in front of the courthouse, Cris Bruch’s Shortest Distance—with its satin-finished stainless-steel surface—reflects the shifting light and color of the surrounding area.  The sculpture has a human scale that contrasts with the monumentality of the building, while its placement and intriguing form encourage passers-by to stop and explore the artwork.

The sculpture’s appearance changes radically as viewers move around it, seeming tightly compressed from one perspective, then unfolding gracefully from another.  The artwork’s faceted surfaces shift continuously, with outside reversing to inside, and front becoming back.

Bruch’s interest in turbulence and flow prompted his initial concept for the sculpture.  Frictions and stresses cause eddies, vortexes, counter-movements, reversals of direction, and whirls within whirls—all suitable metaphors, in the artist’s view, for how human institutions, such as the courts, develop in a democracy.  Progress often appears to occur in a straight line, when all of the diversions and regressions have been edited out, leaving only the clarity of moving from one point to the next.  Bruch’s sculpture suggests that the path is not always so direct.