Portrait of a Moving Target 1 (A Concrete Casting Tube)

Portrait of a Moving Target 1 (A Concrete Casting Tube) consists of two 7' x 7' drawings mounted back to back on a freestanding support wall. Drawn using rust and dirt harvested from the depicted area, the drawings portray one empty concrete casting tube lying horizontally on the ground of a construction site. The life-sized drawings depict two views, seeing through both sides of the same tube. Anderson called it "A see-through drawing of nothing."

The work imagines the present as a concrete casting tube. Like the present, Anderson believes a casting tube has the unique ability to hold change, "it is the intermediary between before and after, past and future."     The drawings depict an ongoing construction project in Honolulu, O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. The pictured tube is one of many used in the construction of an elevated urban rail transit system, otherwise known as the Honolulu Rail project. In his paper, Anderson cites Hawaiian poet Wayne Kaumaulii Westlake's poem "Construction,"       as another example of construction being related to time, the endless or infinite, and the absurd. 

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The documentation functions as a limited survey of the rail, the largest public works project in Hawai'i to date.            The survey reflects an image of present-day O‘ahu and its place within trends of 21st-century urban sprawl. The drawings continue a lineage of historical survey drawings completed to document and assess a land’s topographical features, existing civilization, and future economic potential. Artists like John Webber accompanied British explorers in Hawai‘i in 1785,       and Edward Kern the U.S. Army Corp of Topographical Engineers during Pacific railroad surveys in the newly American West in 1853.