Lift, 2017

Nashville International Airport, Nashville, Tennessee
March 2017 – January 2018

Lift, 2017

Donated CD and DVD discs, Monofilament, Cable ties, Aluminum, Stainless steel cable, and hardware.

Titled Lift, this installation has been designed for the skylights at the Nashville International Airport.  Inspired by landfills and black holes, the form will be similar to looking across a flat bed of water with a whirlpool drawing all the surrounding water into itself; however, the emphasis of this sculpture would be a vortex that is pulling all the memory discs upward like a black hole in space. 

Catherine Randall wrote about this installation for the Nashville Arts Magazine "Art Reaches New Heights at the Nashville Airport," Nashville Arts Magazine, May 2017

Leticia Bajuyo’s Lift is a complex design created by thousands of compact discs and DVDs. The connection of these now-obsolete recordings is not lost in Music City; however, the shimmering plastic circles are Bajuyo’s preferred medium since 2009. “The form is an icon in that it is larger than itself. The memory is still inside there. I’m giving it another life,” Bajuyo says. DVDs are purple, Play Station discs are black, and colored CDs in yellow, blue, and red from the 80s become the paint splotches for this sculpture. The shiny memory sides are exposed nearest the viewer and create almost a water-like reflection of a still pond. The flat surface is interrupted with a funnel that seems to spin up into the skylight and around in a tornadic motion.

The bulk of the structure covers most of the canopy, obscuring the windows until light bursts through the cut-out circles, which cast a dotted dance floor on the otherwise drab carpet.

In the making and installation, 2017

This installation is comprised of eight elements that bolt together on site in order to simplify installation. Measurements were determined by the dimensions of the skylight opening of Concourse C yielding the 14ft x 14ft square mosaic dropped ceiling.