The process of his installing Earth Mover, his ant-like sculpture painted praying-mantis-green, was a lot more complex than artist Christian Ristow expected it to be. “I thought we would be using three forklifts, but that didn't work, so we had to use a 60-ton crane,” he says. “Then that wasn't enough, so we used a 100-ton crane.”
Earth Mover, built out of construction equipment, was inspired by two things Ristow did with his 4-year-old son: watching the demolition of a building, then a few days later watching ants build an anthill. “The excavator and the ants were doing the same thing, just on a different scale,” Ristow says he realized.
The 30-foot tall ant rears up, lifting its front legs off the ground, metal mandibles ready to chomp. It's far more disturbing than the giant robot Ristow brought to the desert last year, which, though imposing, offered up a flower.
“It’s hard to psychically divorce yourself from the idea that you can just squash ants, because they're so small,” he says. “But ants, when magnified, are really menacing.”
