Oh yeah, art hopping.
When I first started my role at GE Aviation, I supported the LEAP engine line. So naturally I think it is the most amazing of all of the engines — the coolest, most advanced engine on the planet. I stand by this, and I come with receipts.
Most people don’t think of jet engines as beautiful pieces of art, but they are, and more. They are art, science and cool all factored into a package that can power you around the world. They are so advanced you forget that you are 30,000 feet up in the stratosphere in shirt sleeves reading a book or snoozing against the plane window.
MoMA in New York displays a GE90 jet engine fan blade, and maybe it doesn’t sound like much, but if you saw one in person, up close all black composite curves and silvery strength, you couldn’t help but marvel at its sleek design and engineering prowess. Each blade on the GE90 is four-feet long and weighs less than 50 pounds. The GE90-115B contains 22 of these blades.
But anyway, the LEAP. Ages ago the video team at work developed a timelapse of a mosaic that was destined for the exhibit Work/Surface. The LEAP was part of a series of large-scale murals inspired by the “Worker Murals” created for the Union Terminal opening of in 1933.
Representing a range of Cincinnati industries and its workforce, including the Formica Corporation in Evendale, the mosaics were created from laser-cut Formica. Like the original murals, the Work/Surface mosaics begin as photographs taken during factory tours and include industries such as Formica (of course), GE Aviation, Rookwood Pottery, Rhinegeist Brewery, Verdin Company and Procter & Gamble.
Ray has never met a factory floor he didn’t love (and he works at P&G), so convincing him to go see a Formica mosaic of a jet engine was an easy task. We didn’t know the exhibit also included P&G before we got there but, lo and behold, there was a Tide mosaic in Formica as well.
Aviation's was the best. Or one of the best at least. No kidding.
It's so well done it looks almost 3-dimensional, but really these murals are gigantic puzzles put together with large and small pieces of Formica. Very cool.
P&G was the only one in the exhibit that didn't take their image from a factory floor. They went with a virtual reality scenario of workers from around the world collaborating via VR. The idea was cool but it didn't show well, and Ray was disappointed. He felt the P&G mural missed the boat on capturing industrial production. Paper plants or a diaper line are inherently fascinating to see, but that's not what they chose to show.
I posed him by it anyway.
Tomorrow is the last day it will be at the Weston, so you’ve mostly missed it. (Sorry.) But you can see the timelapse my coworkers created of it coming together.
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