Orlando’s Skyline Attractions helps launch roller coaster inside art museum
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A single-person roller coaster is mingling with museum patrons thanks to Orlando-based Skyline Attractions, designer of the ride that glides through an art exhibit by EJ Hill.
“As far as we know, this is the first working, ridable roller coaster in a museum — ever,” says Chris Gray, Skyline’s vice president.
The ride has been installed at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art — MASS MoCA, for short — and will be operating during Hill’s “Brake Run Helix,” which debuts at the museum in North Adams, Massachusetts, this weekend.
The artist “has been fascinated with roller coasters his entire life,” Gray says. Hill’s sculptures, paintings and photographs share space with the ride.
The sculptures “sort of play on the form and function of roller coasters and amusement parks,” curator Alexandra Foradas says. “So they’re kind of working in the material vocabulary of backyard roller coasters, using stuff that you could find either in the extra-wood bin or in your backyard or at your local hardware store.”
The ride and its sole passenger take off from the mezzanine level of the museum’s largest gallery, emerging from behind a two-story stage curtain and descending to ground-level maneuvers.
“Once you push the coaster off, it’s just like any other coaster; it runs on gravity. And basically the wheel system is just like any other conventional roller coaster wheel system, you know, it pivots and moves,” Gray says. “It’s basically supposed to resemble a backyard roller coaster, although this is super-high-tech stuff in the realm of roller coasters.”
The passenger exits the ride on a stage on the gallery floor.
“For people who participate, it’s very much like they’re center stage. They’re performers performing in collaboration with the roller coaster, which EJ sees as a performer in and of itself,” Foradas says. “The roller coaster itself is called ‘Brava!’ — an allusion to what you might shout to a female performer, in particular, after a big performance.”
Museum visitors are cordoned off away from the track when it runs once an hour, reservation required.
“As a roller coaster, it’s quite small, but as an art installation, it’s very high drama,” Foradas says.
Hill’s background also includes stints as an endurance-based performance artist, Foradas says.
“He’s been making installations and artworks and performances, sort of meditating on roller coasters, for a long time,” she says.
In Venice, he constructed a wooden coaster track.
“He would spend days walking that track over the course of the exhibition, with his body sort of in lieu of a roller-coaster cart,” Foradas says.
He also had a dramatic ride element request at MASS MoCA: The new coaster’s rails are bright pink.
“The artist wants to paint the world pink,” Gray says. “So that’s one of his primary colors in all of his paintings and structures and has been for years.”
For Hill, pink is a color associated with flowers and with femininity, Foradas says.
“Alongside the roller coaster, we have an installation of new paintings that EJ created as well as the sculptures,” she says. “Those paintings all have a pink ground or pink background. And on top of that is sort of the geometries of roller-coaster track and scaffolding as well as pink flowers, roses mostly.”
The pieces of the track were built at Cornerstone Manufacturing in DeBary, then they were shipped — not yet pink — to Great Coasters International, a manufacturer in Pennsylvania, where they were riveted together. Then came installment at the museum, located in the northeast corner of Massachusetts.
“Brake Run Helix” is scheduled to be at MASS MoCA for 18 months. While displays Hill’s artistic skills, it also may be a business showcase for Skyline. The company has developed weld-free track, which is used in the museum piece.
“It was something we’ve been thinking about for a long, long time — how do we create a track that we don’t have to have any welds on,” Gray says. “Ultimately, the idea came down to that if we bent our tabs right and designed it in a very unique way, then we could probably just rivet everything together.”
Advantages include faster installation and inspection times, lower labor costs and smoother rides. Great Coasters first used it on White Lightning, a coaster at the Fun Spot location near International Drive. The company has since tried it on a curve on the Predator ride at Six Flags Darien Lake in New York and on a drop on a coaster at Michigan’s Adventure in Muskegon.
“It has potential to really revolutionize the way that the amusement industry builds roller-coaster track,” Gray says.
