It will be like putting your finger on a globe and spinning the globe as you pinpoint five mountain landscapes in a straight line at different places in faraway countries!

That is the theme of the fascinating 53°20 – 40’N that will be unveiled in early 2019 when it will be featured at the opening of the new state-of-the-art ETS transit garage in North East Edmonton and will be the largest art commission in the city.

Aluminum casts of unique digital models of a standardized train container will be displayed by being placed on lanterns crowning the transit garage. They will symbolize the global movement of goods from the world city of Edmonton.

edmonton thorsten

The importance of Public Art has been recognized by the city with the creation of the Percent for Art Program. That allocates one percent of any publicly accessible municipal project’s construction budget to be used for the purpose of acquiring art to enhance the quality of life for the local citizens. Existing artworks funded by the program are the Southgate LRT Station’s Immense Mode and the Vaulted Willow in Borden Park.

Thorsten Goldberg, a multimedia artist based in Berlin, states that his masterpiece will be an inspiring look at how Edmonton connects with the rest of the world along the very same latitude by presenting five topographic models of various mountain landscapes located at Mount Chown in Alberta, Mweelrea in Ireland, Zhupanovsky Crater in Russia, Mount Okmok in the Aleutians in Alaska, and an unnamed landscape near Dacaodianzi, China.

Mount Chown

This is the 36th highest peak in Alberta, Canada. It is in the Jasper National Park’s northwest corner and on a border of the Willmore Wilderness Park. It is between the Resthaven Glacier and the Chown Glacier.

Mweelrea

Mweelrea (which means “smooth bald hill“) is the highest mountain in the province of Connacht and is the 34th highest in Ireland. It has a height of 2,670 feet and overlooks Killary Harbour and the Atlantic Ocean. Climbers have to navigate carefully as mist or clouds can rapidly obscure the summit.

Zhupanovsky Crater

A volcanic massif in the southeastern Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, consisting of four stratovolcanoes that overlap. It was inactive for 54 years before it began erupting on October 23, 2013, did so again in 2014, and has continued non-stop into 2016.

Mount Okmok

The highest point on the rim of Okmok Caldera on the northeastern section of Umnak Island in the eastern Alaskan Aleutian Islands. This 5.8 mile wide circular caldera truncates the top of a large shield volcano. A prehistoric crater lake once filled much of the caldera with a maximum depth of about 500 feet and an upper surface reaching to about 1,560 feet. After an eruption on July 12, 2008, that sent a plume of ash to 50,000 feet up in the air, the hydrogeology was greatly changed to five separate sizable lakes. The eruption ended in August 2008 and was the largest eruption there since the early 13th century.