Home / Archive / July 23, 2014
The artist behind Seize the Day
The Source · July 23, 2014
In the story: 7. They got there, 2011–2021.
In a 2014 interview with Brianna Brey, Roadman explained the ideas behind Seize the Day.
The Source interviewed two artists whose pieces had just joined Visit Bend’s Tin Pan Alley collection. Asked about “Seize the Day”, Roadman described the making of it — a mixed-media fibre collage of paint, gold leaf, crystals and fabric, fused rather than sewn and sealed under ten layers of varnish — and then what the parts of it are for.
Her sentence about the emblem is an attribution, and this archive does not make it. She says the emblem is in honour of William Cheney, “who designed it in the early 1900s”. What is on file is that the Bend Park Company, of which Cheney was president, claimed the brand in a notice of July 1912, and that nothing yet says who drew it. Her statement is evidence of what an artist in Bend believed in 2014, which is a real and different thing, and the site carries it as hers rather than as a finding.
The interview also gives the piece its address: the O’Kane Building, in Gasoline Alley, on the side of the Summit Saloon. A 2014 artwork honouring the emblem hangs on the building whose transoms have carried the emblem in leaded glass since 1916. Nothing in the interview says that was intended.
The article alternates “Viki” and “Vicki”. Its prose is filed with its hash under archive/online-research/2026-09-15-roadman-interview/.
From the source
The shamrock is in honor of Hugh O’Kane as he was an Irish immigrant and built the O’Kane building two times (a second time after it burned to the ground in the early 1900s). The Bend emblem, within the sun, is in honor of William Cheney who designed it in the early 1900s.