New statue unveiled in Hamilton park this weekend

A new statue is set to be unveiled in Hamilton’s Confederation Beach Park this Sunday.

The statue, Empower, was designed by Toronto-based artist Lily Otasevic. Though trained as a painter in her native Belgrade, Serbia (then Yugoslavia), Otasevic’s work has mostly focused on  sculptural and photo-based art since her 1994 immigration to Canada. Since that time her works have been featured in Canada, United States, Europe, the United Arab Emirates and China.

For this latest project, Otasevic and other artists were challenged with representing Hamilton as “The Electric City.” The city found “AC power as a catalyst for Hamilton’s development, influencing its population through an immigration boom and shaping the city physically and culturally.”

The final statue was meant to show “Our changing relationship to energy as it transitioned from the visible to the invisible” and embody the spirit of innovation of prolific inventor, Nikola Tesla.

On her influences on the work Otasevic said, “From experimenting with water wheels in the earliest days of his childhood, until many years later, before the thundering Niagara Falls, Nikola Tesla was in awe by the “wheelwork of Nature” as he called it, and what it can offer to humanity.”

“The concept for Empower sculpture draws inspiration from Nature and enquiring human mind. It is inspired by humanity’s role in the higher order of things in the universe as nothing happens outside the context of interconnectedness,” she continued. Otasevic’s proposal beat out 50 other submissions.

Empower will be unveiled at 180 Van Wagner’s Beach Rd. along the Waterfront Trail in Confederation Beach Park on November 12 at 1 p.m. Otasevic, Ward 2