SALT LAKE CITY (AP) – A Salt Lake City artist’s massive moveable sculpture of a praying mantis, which previously descended on the Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, may soon be a centerpiece in a $350 million downtown Las Vegas revitalization project.
The 30-foot-by-40-foot metal insect, built onto a truck and featuring antennae that shoot flames, recently attracted the attention of Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh.
“It’s going to be the entry piece into a shipping container retail space,” creator Kirk Jellum told the Deseret News. “(Hsieh is) taking shipping containers and tricking them out into a hipster-like retail space.”
The big bug has a neck that can be raised 35 feet into the air and can shoot 20-foot flames. Jellum and his wife, Kristen Ulmer, had it mounted on a dump truck and drove it 500 miles to the Burning Man in 2010.
The eclectic, art-focused festival draws tens of thousands of people each year to a dry lake bed north of Reno.
It’s made several other public appearances before its creators sold it to Hsieh. The shoe and apparel company chief is investing millions of his own dollars into the redevelopment effort, which will bring retail and residential properties to Las Vegas’ aging downtown corridor.
“It felt a bit like we were selling one of our children, but we didn’t have a problem with it,” Ulmer said.
The sculpture was the first art project for Jellum, whose background is aerospace engineering. But the praying mantis has since led to other large-scale metal works, including a gigantic female scorpion mounted on a boom truck.
He’s not running out of ideas, either. His latest effort will be an enormous hummingbird, provided he gets an investor to fund the dream.
“It’ll maybe be 50 feet in the air, and who knows how wide the wings will be,” Jellum said. “I’m actually going to articulate the wings, so they’ll move.”
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Information from: Deseret News, http://www.deseretnews.com
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