MOSCOW.- Carolynne Wheeler of the Globe and Mail reported, “Stepping into Zurab Tsereteli’s workshop garden conjures up the same feelings Alice must have had after stepping through Lewis Carroll’s looking glass: Clowns, religious icons and animals, all many times larger than life, mix together in a swirl of colors and shapes.” Zurab Tsereteli is designing a Sept. 11 memorial to sit on the Jersey shore across from the New York skyline, a giant teardrop set inside a bronze pillar bearing the names of those killed in the World Trade Center terror attacks.  The memorial will make its journey by ship across the Atlantic this summer, to be ready for unveiling on the third anniversary of the tragedy.

The final version of the Sept. 11 memorial has a 30-metre bronze pillar with a jagged split lengthwise through the centre. Inside that crevice will be suspended a steel teardrop with the names of the dead will be inscribed around the base.

Tsereteli said he envisioned the memorial six days after hijacked planes brought down the twin towers, and he has worked feverishly for the past year to prepare his masterpiece.

Tsereteli has other works abroad, including the “Good Defeats Evil” statue of St. George at the United Nations headquarters in New York, and a 110-metre, historically inaccurate statue of Christopher Columbus that was rejected by five American cities before being accepted by Puerto Rico.

In Moscow Tsereteli is a sort of unofficial court sculptor. Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov has commissioned several pieces, which now sit in city parks, on several public squares and in the Moscow Zoo, and also found a home for a 50-metre statue of Peter the Great -- the czar who hated Moscow -- on the banks of the Moscow River, a monolith that activists once threatened to blow up.

The international art world may see still more of his work. He is dreaming of a piece to remember the 200 people killed in train bombings in Madrid earlier this month. "I love Spain, I have visited it often, and I was very touched by this tragedy. So if they want something to be done there, I am ready to make a sculpture," he said.

"Erase the original auteurs from your faded, scratched, poorly scanned video collection by "writing" with photography. Pretend you’re a renegade head of a Hollywood studio with damaged dreams and edit someone else’s movie with a reckless disregard for the mainstream. Isolate the out-of-context story points and celebrate the terror of juxtaposition. Mix innocent images of beauty and horror to demystify stars’ highly controlled self-images…. Celebrate your own inflated, self-important movie taste by glorifying movies that were not even remembered for being bad, much less good.

Worship patterns of abuse so strong that they beg to be blown up, cut out and hung on the wall like taxidermy…. Watching a movie should be like hunting. Out of context, every image of the cinema is yours for a split second. Take it before they bury it. Then these pitiful new "movies" made up from the scraps of others won’t be anybody else’s but your own."