Reach for the Sky

BANGOR DAILY NEWS PHOTO BY JOHN CLARKE RUSS Oregon-based artist Daniel Dancer uses a megaphone while atop an Old Town Fire Department ladder truck to direct Indian Island students and other community members as they help form Dancer's 'Sky Canoe' on Monday. Buy Photo

A few minutes after Daniel Dancer finished setting up his project Monday, the side doors of the Indian Island School opened and a flood of water rushed out of the building.

The water, in the form of around 150 students, faculty and other community members dressed in blue, flowed to the school soccer field and gushed past Dancer.

Then Dancer arranged the youngsters along blue lines painted on the grass, near what appeared to be a pathway of brown wood chips, lines of dark dirt, scattered grass clippings, swirls of brown and beige fabric, and twigs.

From ground level, the mess of people and materials didn’t look like much. But Dancer’s creation wasn’t meant to be seen from ground level. To appreciate Dancer’s work, one has to reach for the sky.

Monday afternoon, that meant going up 95 feet in a fire department tower truck to get a photograph of the scene.

What Dancer had created below was a 104-foot-long canoe, manned by a Penobscot Nation Indian figure, with the students and adults serving as the water of the Penobscot River. Dancer called the work “Sky Canoe.”

An Oregon-based artist, Dancer is the founder of Art for the Sky, for which he creates large-scale works made from found objects, natural materials, and people, that are best seen from far above.

It’s a metaphor, Dancer said, for the importance of seeing the world from a different point of view.

“You can see how everything is connected,” Dancer said of viewing things from above. “The number one thing we have to do as a species is awaken our skysight, to be able to see the big picture and how things are connected. Then we’ll take better care of the earth.”

The photograph, which was taken from the basket of the Old Town Fire Department’s tower truck, will be revealed to the students and community at 12:15 p.m. today during a school assembly.

The piece was just a few dozen feet away from the real Penobscot River, which was what drew Dancer to the project in the first place.

American Rivers, a partner organization in the Penobscot River Restoration Trust, brought Dancer to Indian Island. Laura Wildman, the chief engineer of American Rivers’ Connecticut field office, said she and another employee combined their honorarium of $2,500 from a dam removal course they teach to pay Dancer’s fee.

Cheryl Daigle, the trust’s community outreach coordinator, and Michael Vermette, the school’s art teacher, coordinated the trip. Fifteen local businesses also contributed.

“We wanted to find a way to celebrate the tribe’s connection to the river through art,” said Daigle, whose husband, John Daigle, is a Penobscot. “It’s a great way to sort of express our appreciation for this place.”

Dancer has done around 60 similar projects all over the world, but Maine was the one U.S. state in which he had never worked until last week, when students on Vinalhaven helped him form a lobster.

Dancer set up a grid for the Indian Island image Friday and spent the weekend looking at different canoes at local museums. With help from Vermette, Wildman and her 7-year-old daughter, Hannah, Dancer filled in the grid Monday morning.

The body of the canoe was made with wood chips. The group detailed the canoe with patches of dirt and created a design of double curves using a stencil Vermette made. The design of the stencil was based on a canoe in the school’s lobby, which was crafted by Patrick Almenas, an Indian Island resident and expert in birch bark canoes. The double curves don’t have a specific meaning, Almenas said, but are similar to ancient Penobscot decorative symbols.

Dancer, who is part Mohawk, said the project took on special significance after he and Almenas went for a paddle Friday.

“When I’m doing a Native American project, I take it to an extra level,” he said. “Here I was met with a master birch bark canoe builder. We took a birch bark canoe out on the river, and we had three bald eagles show up. It was amazing.”

Vermette, a painter, added some artistic touches to the Penobscot figure, arranging the fabric under its eye to create skin folds.

After the students and adults were arranged on their stomachs, Dancer went up in the firetruck. He took photographs and videotaped the session for a movie he makes of all his projects.

The students took pride in being involved.

“It was really an honor,” said eighth-grader Seneca Love, who was wearing a blue T-shirt. “Not too many students get to do something like this.”

The end result, Dancer said, rated a rare 10 on his own personal scale. But “Sky Canoe” was fleeting. The fabric was removed and will be reused, and the rest of the materials will be returned to the land by today.

“It’s about impermanence,” Dancer said. “Everything’s always changing, nothing lasts. We need to learn to appreciate every single moment. We need to enjoy it, and life’s like that.”