Two new wood kit pieces in MDF. Models of video game weapons for the upcoming GLS Games and Art exhibition.
Gun show preview
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Category Archives: Art
Construct: some dissembling required
One Week
Click to enlarge.
Construct
Logical limits of wood-kit construction
These figures are slotted wood-kit style construction in MDF. The tallest stand between 5 and 6′ tall and there are no fasteners or adhesives employed in their construction. These three figures are an Ak-47 assault rifle, an M16 assault rifle and a dip, or fountain pen. They are the beginning of a series of models of objects personified in this way. They are fantastically simply absurd.
Old Sculpture, New Animation
Jim Escalante, professor of book arts at UW-Madison, shot this series of images while helping me document ‘Anatomy of a Cube or This is not a Stack of Crates.’ This is the resulting stop motion animation.
MAMMUTHUSTYRANNOHELIKOSAURUS
New sculpture in baltic birch ply, CAD designed, fully virtual and now actual. With special thanks to my friends and fellow graduate students in the UW art department who helped set it up as well as Latitude Corp. in Verona Wisconsin for their masterful fabrication service.
Un-Natural History Transfer Prints on Panels
Unnatural History
Consider that the fossil record humans leave behind will necessarily include those fossilized things from human prehistory which were excavated and preserved for scientific study. Fossils of species extinct for millions of years during the human time span will exist in the same strata as the remnants of a technologically advanced human society. Should our written history dissolve over the course of geological time, paleontologists of the future will be left to untangle the physical record of humanity in whatever disintegrated state it might exist in the final days of such an advanced society. Considering what humans might leave behind allows us to consider the subjectivity of interpretation and the ways in which appearance can be deceiving.
Sketches for Unnatural History
Some photoshop mashups as sketches for a new series of unnatural history. Imagine the kinds of early misinterpretations possible if paleontologists in a million years recovered our fossil record including those things we have unearthed and placed in museums along with our own physical record of human creation and engineering. These two sketches are for sculptures that I see taking the form of enormous versions of those small die-cut wooden dino skeletons one can find in natural history museums. Coming away from the crate series I am interested in other forms of interpretation that we undertake and most interesting is the interpretation of physical remnants be they animal or human in nature.
Flint Children’s Museum
IN-KOM-PRI-HEN-SUH-BUHL installation images part 3
Part III of the -KOM-PRI-HEN-SUH-BUHL installation images.
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- In-kom-pri-hen-suh-buhl installation view
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- Knowledge Before and After Experience or What You See is What You Get
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- Knowledge Before and After Experience internal view
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- Hyper-Crate or Incomprihensible Space
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- Non-Stacking Shipping Unit with Self Contradictory Crate
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- Non-Stacking Shipping Unit interrior view
IN-KOM-PRI-HEN-SUH-BUHL installation images part 2
Part II of the installation images from IN-KOM-PRI-HEN-SUH-BUHL.
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- Anatomy of a Cube or This is Not a Stack of Crates
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- Things as they Are or Things as they Appear to Be closed view
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- Things as they Are or Things as they Appear to Be open view
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- Home Sweet Home with Self Contradictory Crate
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- Self Contradictory Crate Interrior View
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- Home Sweet Home Interrior View
IN-KOM-PRI-HEN-SUH-BUHL installation images part 1
Installation views of IN-KOM-PRI-HEN-SUH-BUHL.
Many of these pieces contain peep holes which allow a viewer to see inside of the crates. The basic idea of these works is to manipulate the notion of what art objects are or can be to explore the broader concept of the interplay between our perception and reason; both tools which generate knowledge. The confrontation of crates, which are tangentially related to art objects by their transport, as art objects in and of themselves causes one to rethink what an art object can be, thus using expectation and reason to thwart perception. Many of these crates also contain peep holes which function as view ports to their interior. The reality of these internal views is dissonant with that of the exterior of the crate as well as with a viewer’s expectations. In this way the fantastic possibilities of the mind are laid out though playful interaction between one’s reason, expectation, and perception.
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- Installation view of IN-KOM-PRI-HEN-SUH-BUHL
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- The Layman’s Critique of Kant or Incomprihensible
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- Iconprihensible Interrior View
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- Micro Museum of Modern Art or We Are All Fish
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- Micro Museum of Modern Art Interrior View
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- Outside in or The Crate with the Sound of its Own Transport
IN-KOM-PRI-HEN-SUH-BUHL statement
IN-KOM-PRI-HEN-SUH-BUHL statement
Art is a contemporary practice which operates uniquely in the realm of ideas or all things imaginable to the human mind. It is a question driven practice and not a means to an end but rather an end in itself because art can create possibilities which are otherwise unimaginable for their frivolity or absurdity. In this sense art is the practice of an important part of the larger realm of reason.
Questions are a driving force behind all endeavor; questions that seem unanswerable. Never contented with things as they are or things as they appear, the mind, a powerful creator, gatherer, filter and organizer of information, strives for deep explanation. Contradictions abound in the balance between the mind’s narratives, constructed and shared, and that which is perceptible. Tempered by the desire for a sensibly predictable world; the mind’s imagination is a tool which can pry open doors to new means of understanding or construct for itself unbreachable barriers to reality. Past experiences influence the rational faculty, which in turn influences perception, so new experiences obscured by the anticipated can be easily disregarded. Yet minute details masked by the mundane can be the threshold to entirely new ways of thinking.
The sum of experience and knowledge includes all concepts from those nearly universal in understanding to those only understood by a fraction of all people, incomprehensible to the rest, and constituted in reconciliation of perception and reason retarded by their interplay. As a result, what you see is not always what you get. What is real can be preferable to how things appear, and knowledge today is that which was unintelligible yesterday. Curiosity, imagination, and often absurdity are vehicles to our understanding; their direction is random or at best under the guide of a faulty compass.