Immortalizing The Ephemeral

BRANDON SEMEN UK’S QUEST FOR PROGRESSIVE PERFECTION.

- Mike Ferrentino

It starts with a line or a single movement. Drawing from all that he has already done, his past successes and failures, the artist takes this seed, this line, this movement, and begins to build. For weeks he sculpts soil into towering buttes, smoothing transitions from wall to ground, linking together obstacles that are so improbable as to not even be considered to the outside eye. He works with a dedicated crew. Every day, they are there soon after sunrise. Every day, they work relentlessly until dark. Even with the assistance of machinery, the digging is brutal. Heavy mud in winter, rock and baked clay in summer.

The sculpted trail begins to emerge, pulled from the artist’s mind into existence by the combined effort of the crew. They have dug his vision out of blank soil into a gravity-fed sculpture that is both beautiful and terrifying. The artist trades his shovel for a bike and proceeds to ride with a style and authority that very few humans can ever hope to emulate. Photos are taken, videos made. And then, in spite of the backbreaking labor that went into building this massive kinetic playground, it is over. The soil is plowed back to nothing as if the artist and his crew had never been there at all. The only evidence of their work exists in a two-minute-long video and a few photographic gigabytes.