“Oscar is a big, “free-spirited” Lab mix. My husband and I adopted him when he was just a few months old. We’ve lived together as a little family for over a decade. When Oscar was a puppy, I did a one-semester residency at Bard College. I used to walk Oscar off-leash on campus, and one afternoon he bounded up to what looked like, from a distance, a small pond. He got into the water—which seemed, in hindsight, a little shallow for a pond—and started splashing around. Within minutes, a furious campus security officer was running in our direction, waving his arms. Turns out the “pond” was actually an installation called Parliament of Reality by the renowned Icelandic Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, though I will forever think of it as the first place I ever saw Oscar swim. How different our experiences with art must be.”

From The Paris Review.

[Photo Credit: Laura van den Berg for The Paris Review.]