"Negative Volume: Snow"

I'm working through some minimalist sculpture/environmental art ideas. I call this most recent piece "Negative Volume: Snow".

We the People

"We the People," the current exhibition on display throughout Hamden, CT, brings the startled citizenry of this small New England town a look at the darker side of the human condition.



These anonymous Hamden artists have taken the venerable form of the portrait bust and through a few well-chosen displacements of medium and presentation made it a potent vessel for commentary on contemporary life.



They have discarded traditional media such as stone or bronze and replaced it with the pumpkin, producing disturbingly hollow, irregularly shaped heads. Eschewing pedestals, these gourds-as-heads have been placed directly in the suburban landscape, vacant eyes staring up at the viewer from the ground, emphasizing the strange decapitated quality of these emptied shells.



Though the facial expressions are frequently carved with forceful exaggeration and animation, the artists have gone to great lengths to emphasize the void within the head, often inserting a candle or some other feeble light source to illuminate the vacuum behind the frenzied physiognomies.



Strangely, considering the earthy methods used to create these images, they seem to warn of a terrible detachment from reality that is only possible in our digital media-saturated age. These heads act as disembodied emoticons, portraits of the frantic and empty doppelgangers that replace actual human beings in the reality-programming based fully interactive one-stop shopping chatroom that we find ourselves swimming through in 2003.



On display through November 1

Text and images taken from FIMP's exhibition catalog/Book of the Month from October 2003

Because she said so.

Today, Rachel's animals wore play doh hats.

Kicking Daddy's Butt.

So I'm thinking this one's done:





You saw its beginnings here. I'm calling it "ape or angel", for now.

Then Rachel does this:





and says "Does it look like Rachel with a pretzel nose?".

In a couple of weeks I'm just going to give her the studio, and I'll work on the living room floor.

trees, buildings, and a chicken

Rachel was building a city this morning, and she started with this border of trees. . .

Car-Pig

Every morning I "reset the stage" in our living room. This involves putting the blocks, legos, cars, animals, dress-up clothes, dinosaurs, Cozy-Coupe, musical instruments, and other odd objects back in their proper places, so that Rachel can come and give them all a good playing with when she gets up. Without fail, there is some beautiful collision between items that wants to be dragged away from the world of play and tossed into the world of art. Toddler-surrealism is a wonderful thing. One of today's themes was animals on cars. Now I have to give her back her pig and mini-cooper.

Block Snake

Here's the latest from Rachel, titled "Block Snake":





You may remember some of her previous work, which is much more expressionistic. With this piece it seems she's going all Bauhaus on us.

Toddler Taunts Termites.

My two year old daughter continues her exploration of sculpture with this piece, her first truly site-specific work. What at first appears to be a fairly decorative effort, a simple arrangement of carefully chosen twigs, becomes more complex when the site itself is taken into consideration. A full appreciation of this piece depends on the viewer recognizing those three white circular patches of cement for what they are - the evidence of a recent battle with a termite infestation. The placing of twigs directly over the holes where the underlying soil was drenched with pesticide designed to kill wood-eating insects creates a powerful tension - a juxtaposition of food and poison. Is she taunting the termites, or is this some kind of peace-offering? Is she acknowledging that termites have a rightful place in the world, as long as it isn't in our basement?

Her preliminary studies for this piece, one of which is seen below, shed little light on her intent. They seem to focus primarily on the formal qualities of the work, giving little hint of the complex content in the finished piece.

Cubist Garden Rabbit

To this point, most of my two-year old daughter's artistic efforts have been in 2-d media; crayons, markers, and photography (see here and here).

Her forays into 3-d have been primarily installation/environments, using various scatter techniques. These are often quite ambitious and energetic, but lack some of the discipline of the traditional sculptural media. Today she has produced her first non-Lego free-standing sculpture, an untitled piece that obviously owes a great debt to both Cubism and our 100 pound dog, who during one of his mad romps actually managed to knock the ear off of a concrete rabbit.

Sculpture between your ears, part II

So, a couple of months ago I offered you some Free Bad Luck, a sculpture that I felt was just as effective when made in your head as it would be if I went to the trouble of actually knocking it together. Here's another one.

Get yourself four chairs. The one's above are just a suggestion, this is your sculpture, use any chairs you want. Add a longish rectangular table. Put three chairs on one side, and one on the other. Now, here's where it gets fun. You're going to make two sculptures, one in which the single chair is the most powerful one, and one in which that chair is the place you don't want to be. For the first sculpture, slide all four chairs up to the table, three on one side, one on the other. Who sits in the single chair? The CEO, the person in charge. For sculpture number two, take that single chair and slide it away from the table, maybe five or six feet. Now who's in charge? That single chair has become the hotseat, and the three chairs have become the inquisitors.

I was given that little mental sculpture by J. P. Darriau, a wonderful sculpture professor at I.U. who taught a drawing class that was taken by all of the printmaking graduate students. He was certainly one of the most unique and engaging professors I encountered there. I'm guessing he picked up this idea from Augusto Boal's Games for Actors and Non-actors, specifically the "Great Game of Power". J.P. tended to dump an enormous amount of interesting stuff on his classes, and just hoped we would sift something useful out of what he threw at us. It was great.

For those following the election news, "Hats Versus Cigarettes" is winning the race for next month's book, with 6 votes, compared to three votes for "How To Draw B. F. Skinner" and one vote for combining the two. Scroll down a couple of posts, and vote for the book you want to see made. Voting closes on February 25!