Crossing the Threshold into Permanence

Gordon Hoople, PhD, co-founding member of ArtBuilds Collective and associate professor of integrated engineering, describes his newest art installation as “an invitation to step outside of your normal routine and into a liminal space of ambiguity.” 

Kit Carson Park’s newest public art structure, “Threshold Five,” was designed, created and installed by San Diego-based nonprofit collective ArtBuilds and commissioned by the Escondido Community Foundation. This is ArtBuilds' first permanent installation, a milestone Hoople says "will open new doors for ArtBuilds," since many calls for proposals require a completed permanent installation before an artist can even apply.

“Threshold Five” consists of five hexagonal gates that appear to open up or shrink depending on where the viewer is standing, with no front and no single path through. "Depending on your mood, you may see the gates as an opening up, an invitation to grow. Others may instead see the gates shrinking. Still others may find themselves seeing the skeletal forms of a prehistoric animal," Hoople says. Looking straight on through the largest gate, the structure seems to pull the viewer in, and that's exactly the point: "the beauty of art is that people get to decide what it means to them."

At the piece's dedication, Hoople watched that idea play out in real time. "My favorite moment was when someone said, 'I love this sculpture, it looks different from every angle,'" he recalls, "as that is exactly the effect we were trying to achieve."

With “Threshold Five,” ArtBuilds set out to build something permanent for the first time. The piece began in 2021 as a student concept called Carl the Caterpillar, a 70-foot sculpture with dozens of gates and a giant caterpillar face. Over several years, that idea gradually evolved into the five refined gates now standing in Kit Carson Park.

ArtBuilds, an interdisciplinary group of artists, engineers and thinkers from a range of fields, had previously focused on temporary installations like "Penumbra" and "Re:Emergence" at events including Burning Man and YOUtopia. Designing something meant to last decades brought new challenges. The hardest problem, Hoople says, was one that no visitor will ever see: the foundation buried beneath the sculpture.