Yes, he and his Seattle-based art partners Ben Beres and Zac Culler (all of us squeezed around a small table in a noisy bar) want to reclaim an abandoned, contaminated gas station and turn it into a park that exists, as much as it can, off the power grid. Yes, the trio wants to build this island of green on a built-over corner of Georgetown, an industrial/residential Seattle neighborhood on the other side of the usually figurative tracks, with a history of poverty, toxic dumping and municipal neglect. Yes, SuttonBeresCuller (SBC) is wrangling with the EPA, learning about brownfields and soil remediation, and writing grants that describe Mini Mart City Park as “the urban landscape… given back to nature” and “not only a truly 'green' building but a living work of art.” But don't call them eco-artists.

These three men are nothing if not intrepid-they've trapped themselves in boxes and bags; built a drive-through gallery; locked themselves in a room with thousands of keys outside the door, hoping visitors will find the right one-but they get anxious about what people call them. “We've been called pranksters because some of our stuff is funny,” Beres says. “I hate that. We've been called performance artists, but we also do photography. We've been called conceptual artists, which I don't mind, though I think of a 'conceptual artist' more as a writer, a thinker instead of a doer. We've been called frat boys-I mean have you ever seen John try to throw a football?” Beres laughs. “He can't!”

You could call Mini Mart City Park architecture or an installation, earthwork or an intervention. The City of Seattle's zoning department describes its land as “parks and open space” and its building, curiously, as an “amusement park.” For ARCADE, let's call it sculpture.

The former Pervoich Brothers gas station is a small, rotting building on the corner of Warsaw and Ellis, across the street from a Boeing machine shop and a school for kids who get in trouble. It's a brownfield - according to Webster's: “a tract of land that has been developed for industrial purposes, polluted and then abandoned”- and, for years, was a magnet for drug dealers and doers and a rendezvous point for prostitutes and johns. While doing initial cleaning on the site, SBC started a collection of vials and tiny plastic drug-baggies printed with patterns of dollar signs, the Batman logo and skulls in profile on them.

The three artists will keep the building's façade, replace the wooden walls with concrete and bury the back of the station under a grassy knoll. A pathway will wind to the top of the hill (the ceiling of the building), with benches, trees and a park light powered by solar panels. The interior of the station will be what Beres calls a “blank slate”: A room for gallery shows, installations, readings, events. A door at the buried, back end of the gallery will lead to an underground tunnel - probably with a pool of some kind on its roof - that empties onto the grass. Mini Mart City Park will be a building that is a park and a park that is a building, as well as a restoration project, a community center and a contained, three-dimensional object to be admired from a distance.

Like the best SBC projects, Mini Mart City Park conflates public and private, outdoor and indoor, building one kind of environment and shoving it into an alien context that reorganizes the way people think about where things belong. SBC specializes in matters out of place and making the familiar foreign.

SBC also creates playful situations that are a little reckless and precarious: For 151 Goldfish (2000) they balanced 76 fish bowls, with 151 fish, atop a grid of three-foot cedar posts in the woods. For Three Day Weekend (2005), they hoisted a glass-bottomed trailer ten feet above a gallery floor and convinced different families to live in it for an evening while an audience gawked below. For The Island (also in 2005), they built an ersatz desert island with a palm tree and rocks, set the thing in Lake Washington and lived as castaways in tattered suits with a few days' supply of food, water and beer. In the process, they severely snarled traffic on the 520 bridge and baffled Seattle-area TV stations. “Are they selling something?” the newscasters kept asking each other. “I don't know!”

A few more SBC projects, just to give a sense of their variety and accumulated weight: They've panhandled in tuxedos with a sign reading “Barely in Need” or with prosthetic ears covering their eyes; built mobile living rooms and parks, set them atop trailers and hauled them around the city; and performed an homage to Joseph Beuys called I Like Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving Likes Me that swapped the coyote for a turkey.

Mini Mart City Park is another built environment turned inside out, a building/park mash-up that will turn a brownfield green-if they can secure the funding and permission from local and federal government agencies. The process has been even murkier and slower than you'd think. “We're used to throwing shit up, going out on the street, playing by our own rules,” Beres says. “This is so by-the-book. After doing all this, we could probably run for office.”

The project has been on paper since 2005, won a $50,000 Creative Capital award in 2007 and has been floating on a raft of bureaucracy ever since. An abbreviated list of some of the problems Mini Mart City Park has bumped up against:

The first design (to take the roof off and let trees grow up through the inside of the building) had to be scrapped because without a roof to hold it together, the walls would be a wind hazard. And the land is on a “liquification zone” (Georgetown was built on tidal flats), meaning it will turn to quicksand in an earthquake and so requires extremely deep foundations.

There is also a church within 600 feet. Technically you cannot build two “community centers” that close to each other.

The soil itself is toxic from two 2,000-gallon petrol tanks that leaked diesel for years. Boeing used the site to store surplus fuel during WWII, pulled the tanks out later and never did any cleanup. The EPA drilled a dozen core samples, and they all came out filthy with diesel. If the EPA decides the toxins are confined to the site, SBC will have to dig up a massive amount of soil and ship it to Portland for remediation (which involves lacing it with bacteria that eat the petrol and ooze it out into the air of a warehouse, which is then filtered for the poisons). If the EPA decides that petrol “bloom” is just the uniform toxicity of Georgetown soil, leaking onto the lot from elsewhere, they won't have to scrub the soil. "We want to make it clean and green, but then what's the point?" Sutton asks. "How long until it gets contaminated?"

“This piece is really intuitive and expressionist,” Culler jokes after running down a litany of bureaucratic issues. “It's about my relationship with my father.”

SBC has been denied 13 grants in a row because the project sits in a liminal zone that doesn't quite fit narrow grant specifications (another way in which the nonprofit-grant model can punish expansive thinking). “We decided,” Beres says, “to do this project during the worst economic times of our lives.”

Nearly everyone, from SBC's architect to its contact at Creative Capital, has marveled that the trio keeps trudging on, despite the logistical problems. Mini Mart City Park seems like a ship pushing through Arctic ice-either the shape of the ice will change or the hull will collapse. So far the hull, by sheer force of will, is holding.

“It is bizarre,” Sutton adds, “for us to be three artists trying to raise money to make a giftwrapped park for Seattle. We're taking this dumpy, fucked-up building nobody else would touch, and we want to reclaim it for the neighborhood, for the public benefit and artistic health, and actual health, of the community.”

That's one hell of a sculpture. At press time, 4Culture had granted a 2009 Arts Cultural Facilities Award of $68,000 to SuttonBeresCuller for Mini Mart City Park.

Visit www.minimartcitypark.com for more information or to donate to the project. To learn about SBC's other projects - which include burying an eight-foot neon sculpture of a double helix, capped with a glass manhole cover, in the middle of downtown Seattle - visit www.suttonberesculler.com.