-We are at Wilshire and La Brea at the Metro Station.

What you're seeing is a piece that speaks about architecture using color and using forced perspective to invite the user.

-It's like a love letter.

I haven't talked to him about that, but I feel like it's a love letter that he's made to Los Angeles.

-The whole project is done on a computer screen or on a notebook or on something small.

Then all of a sudden, you actually have to walk through this space, and you're like, "Oh, it actually worked."

When I first imagined the project, I wanted to think about the way the train tracks have that zero-point perspective.

I thought to bring that up into the street level is a way to pull the people in.

It's pulling you down into it.

I think when we look at paintings, and we look at artwork, we're not just doing it with our eyes; we're also doing it with our bodies as well.

I think when it comes to public art, that's where that really comes into play.

The title of the piece is Infinite Landscape: Los Ángeles Para Siempre.

-Which literal translation is Los Angeles Forever, is something that I know Eamon thought very thoughtfully about because this really is a forever piece.

This is part of the architecture of the station.

-Growing up in Tucson, I always was like, "God, I want to live in a city where there's a train."

I'm skateboarding in some hot asphalt.

It was like, "Oh, man, I wish I lived in a city that had public transportation."

I think the work started to change in scale when my interest became more rooted in ideas of the ways in which art functions in culture in a civic language.

I think looking at artists like Roberto Burle Marx, who was a Brazilian artist, and he did the tile for Ipanema, the famous tile pattern there.

He was very interested in art functioning as part of urban design.

That's when I started thinking of art being this broader language and less specific about my experience and maybe potentially about everybody's experience.

The piece is at the Wilshire/La Brea Station.

That is an area that has gone through a lot of transformations, and I was very intrigued by the early architecture of that area, the Deco era.

When I was looking at a lot of the buildings and reading about that history and thinking about art movements that were very into the idea of internationality and looking at ancient architecture that was coming about in this modernization, but they were looking in the past, which is, in some ways, contradictory.

It ended up creating this beautiful synthesis in a lot of ways that had a lot of humanistic characteristics to it.

A lot of that architecture was in an era when that whole area was developed to be experienced looking out the window of a car.

I thought that is so interesting that here we are now, and it's actually more about being able to traverse that space underground.

-Oftentimes people think about transit as being something about getting from A to B, and that's the focus.

Really, a lot of transit is waiting for a train, waiting for a bus, riding a train, riding a bus.

Those experiences are the ones in which we added an art element.

-The idea of traveling through spaces and actually communing with public art makes it even more an intimate experience.

-Different from galleries and museums, these are ones you're going to brush up against on a daily basis, and it's etching and grading into your consciousness.

-The Metro Art program began in the early 1980s, and the first actual work that was visible to the public was a work by Tom Etherton in one of our rail tunnels, and that was 35 years ago this year.

There are over 130 stations in the Metro system, and there are artworks integrated into each of them.

Our most recent projects on the D Line, for example, those artists were commissioned over nine years ago, so they worked on those projects for nine years.

It's not a museum or a gallery where someone is going with intention to look at art.

It's something that's just along the journey.

-As a transplant, you land in a place, and sometimes you really don't know where you are.

Public art is often a foothold.

That mural, that sculpture, that one thing that you recognize that, "Okay, now I need to turn left or right," but then it becomes even more intimate, more familiar.

Because sometimes you may need to cry under one.

Sometimes you may just sit because you're tired.

They become partners.

They become neighbors.

-They're sort of like their guideposts to belonging in Los Angeles.

A lot of times people think art is just decorative; it's just an add-on at the end, but I think it's core to our democracy.

I think we talk about it as a different kind of infrastructure.

It's saying, who are we?

Who is included?

What's our story?

-LA Metro is not unique, but very committed to engaging arts professionals in the selection of the artists.

That was something that was instituted at the very, very beginning of the program by one of the initial board members of the agency, who was George Takei, who said, "I want to make sure that all artists for the Metro system are selected by arts professionals."

Our early commissions, we maybe would have 100 artists that applied.

We're now getting thousands of artists.

-We didn't conspire.

-No, no conspiring.

-This was nine years ago when we started on this.

This work is called Miracle of La Brea.

It's referencing the tar and the Art Deco history.

What was here before all of the Miracle Mile was the barley fields.

I've taken an element from the Wilshire Tower.

My idea was to make it as if the tar had somehow magically created this composition.

We're looking through that out onto the agricultural past, showing the barley fields.

-Some of the priorities for placing public art in a specific area, let's say a train station, is where in that train station?

What work has the artist done before that can actually signify an area or a certain kind of public?

What are their ideas?

Do they have concepts that are generous just in terms of understood to be larger than necessarily an individual understanding of a specific place or time, but something that can be unpacked that everyday people can actually look and be curious about?

-In the center, I wanted to create the feeling of an animated sequence of planetary shapes emphasizing that movement down into the station.

Then you've also got these rays that are coming up.

I like this idea of if you see the people coming up on the escalator, it's like this kind of burst, almost like a sunburst.

-It is very much an immersive work.

You see it from the street.

It beckons you in.

It literally draws you in with the lines.

You're just then surrounded in this golden hue.

It's different at different times of day.

Then you walk down into the station, and you turn the corner, and it's still there.

It's just enveloping you.

-I love the idea, too, of being able to see people walking through those shapes and seeing the building as you're going up through the escalator.

You're following these circles that are starting to animate your way through the station.

The Metro piece, to me, in some ways, a lot of the motifs in it are about objects passing through.

-In any particular city, you have artists who signify what it means to be human in this particular time, in this particular landscape, in this particular area.

Having that open to the public, just passing by with your kids, passing by with friends, or just on your way to work, it really brings you outside of yourself.

-After that entrance pulls you in, you have this moment of the sequence starts again.

There's echoes in the motifs.

The piece here, right here, is an echo of what's happening above in the overhang.

There's almost repetition and rhythm within the piece, which is something that I also wanted people to-- whether they consciously absorb it or subconsciously.

There's a rhythm to the city.

There's a rhythm to the way that you move through the city.

There's a lot of influence of abstraction from the Americas that I don't think people are super aware of.

Josef Albers went to Mexico and was highly influenced by a lot of the abstraction that he saw in Monte Albán in Oaxaca.

Frank Lloyd Wright, his Hollyhock House, a lot of elements, motifs in the Hollyhock House are rooted in Chichén Itzá, which is the Mayan architecture.

That body of work that I created is in that relationship to the ideas of an architecture that is rooted in abstraction in the Americas, but very influenced also by an international language.

-To get chosen for public art that's permanent and installed at scale is amazing.

It's like you're leaving something there for humanity, like your legacy.

-I think the intention of public art is to give a sense of belonging.

As an aspect of intentional placement, I think that it's part of the civic realm and it's part of what makes Los Angeles Los Angeles.

You are part of something larger than yourself.

As an artist, you may make a work of art, and then have it being seen by a public makes it more intimate because it's a conversation.

-Then this last section was like the section to take you home.

You have these rays that are still pulling you into the station, and then it starts to even out with these horizontal lines.

I'm always trying to allude to the idea of symmetry, but not quite have it be equal.

It's always slightly off symmetrical.

On the left side here, you have the same angles, you have the same parts of the motif, but then the right side, it starts to reveal what was up at the top.

It's like this one cut hole, like a keyhole with one of those blue shapes going through it.

That's what takes you in.

-This program was made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.