Gary Greff's latest addition to his decades-long, colossal public art project, The Enchanted Highway, is up and nearly complete. Titled "The Fisherman's Dream," it recreates a lake surface 50 feet above the table-flat North Dakota prairie, beneath which swim an assortment of 30-foot-long game fish: a northern walleye, a small mouth bass, a bullhead, a bluegill, a salmon. A rainbow trout, 70 feet long, jumps through the surface of the suspended "lake."

"I just gotta add a boat on top with a man in it," Gary told us. "I consider it almost done -- but, you know, an artist is never done...."

Gary, his energy unspent, has already begun work on the next addition to The Enchanted Highway: a huge web festooned with giant spiders. "I was gonna put it on a big tree, but now I think I'm gonna hang it between big flowers," he told us. "Maybe a big yellow daisy." Gary's reasoning is aesthetic, not entomological. "It'll be more showy," he says. "It'll be awesome."

Always eager for an excuse to return to North Dakota, we asked Gary when he expected this latest giant sculpture to be complete. "That'll be a summer -- wait. No. Fall? Well, a fall-winter project," he corrected himself, laughing. "However it goes, it never goes quick."

[04/30/2007]