Gravity Pool: Pickathon 2025
For the past quarter century, the first weekend in August has cradled a community festival like no other. Pickathon Music Festival is known for its immersive, community-focused experience showcasing art, culinary experiences, and kid-friendly activities alongside its diverse musical lineup. Each year, Pendarvis Farm’s 100 acre property transforms into an otherwordly landscape of hand-built stages and gathering spaces that are as much a part of the experience as the music itself.
In summer 2025, we returned to Pickathon’s Galaxy Courtyard to honor the festival’s 25th anniversary mascot, the Steelhead. Our installation, Gravity Pool, draws from the fish’s shape and movement to form passageways and gathering spaces. At night, the structure comes alive with music and light, inviting festival-goers to step inside and experience it together.
Design: Matthew Thomas & Christopher Cardoza
Build
Gravity Pool was constructed by a crew of 30 volunteers who donated a cumulative 945 hours of onsite labor to see this fish brought to life, in addition to months of design and administrative work before the first board was ever cut. The crew first assembled for a design kickoff party early in the summer to learn about what they would be creating together, where they signed up for volunteer shifts that spanned two weeks in July before the festival began.
Volunteers of all skill levels learned side-by-side, turning raw lumber into curved passageways, shaded gathering spaces, and a form that seemed to swim across the courtyard.
This project was made possible by the collaborative spirit that defines Pickathon. We’re deeply grateful to the festival team, the Guild of Oregon Woodworkers, and every volunteer who gave their time and energy to set this build afloat. Gravity Pool was a shared experience, and its success belongs to everyone who showed up ready to work.
Design
Matt Thomas and Christopher Cardoza first met while studying architecture at Portland State University, and have been collaborating on large-scale, site-specific installations ever since. For Gravity Pool, they drew on their shared design language, clean geometry shaped by organic movement, to capture the Steelhead mascot in both form and motion. Their process began months before construction, refining the fish’s sweeping curves and spatial flow so it could function as both an art piece and a gathering place. Every angle and passageway was planned to balance visual impact with volunteer-friendly build methods, ensuring the design could be brought to life by many hands without sacrificing its sculptural intent.
