The Ambiguous Family, Part 1

I recently saw 8: The Mormon Proposition and got to thinking about families.  The documentary outlines the Mormon church’s financial and interpersonal mobilization to pass Proposition 8 in California restricting marriage to a man and a woman.

For ten years I taught at various levels from middle school through college, and interacted with hundreds of families.  I’ve seen both successful and utterly dysfunctional traditional families (one mom, one dad, a few kids).  I’ve also seen both very healthy and unhealthy non-traditional families (one mom and a child, or two dads, or a mom and a grandparent, etc).

I certainly don’t know how to measure the success of a family unit, but I can tell it has more to do with the relationship between its members than what gender or age they are.

So, the idea of doing a sculpture that represents a family with ambiguous gender roles was an interesting one.  I especially like the sculptor Cordell Taylor, and was thinking of using a visual vocabulary similar to his use of raw steel and abstracted geometrical shapes.  In it I want to show the family in a posture of protection, like a group of elephants circling their young during an attack.

Some original sketches:

And a few models to get a feeling for the weight and three-dimensional flow.  I personally am leaning toward the tall angular one; it reminds me of the rock art in southern Utah.

Now, to figure out the final material to use.  I’d like it to repurpose something rather than use new concrete or steel or wood.


Cordell Taylor

8: The Mormon Proposition

Ammo Table, Part 3

Now that the search is underway and I’m gradually gathering these casings, I’ve found I should start figuring out what on earth I’m going to do with them when I get several thousand of the little suckers.  I’ve tried to approach prototyping my art like I approach voting -- do it early and often.

While fondling some of the casings (why is it everyone edges away from my table at the coffeehouse when I do this?) I realized that the open end and the closed end are two very different colors -- the shadow of the open end is dark, even when viewed outside, and the closed end is reflective.  Now I’ve got a direction -- I plan to arrange the casings open-end or closed-end up so that the resulting pattern depicts a portrait, kind of like if you zoom in on a digital black-and-white photograph.  At some great magnification, all you see is black or white pixels.  

Who would be an appropriate subject for a portrait out of spent ammunition?  Martin Luther King, Charles Taylor, and JFK all seem a little too trite and obvious.  Mickey Mouse?  The McDonald’s logo?  Here are a few ides, pixelated to the approximate degree they would be on the table.

Several years ago I did a series of sketches on Humphrey Bogart, and was fascinated with his eyes in particular.  Here are some that have potential for the table design.

Since pixelated computer graphics only have a small resemblance to bullets, I decided to prototype the image again, this time by drilling holes (representing the open-end-up shells) into a board with the graphic of Bogart’s eyes.

Ammo Table, Part 2

Old ammo casings are harder to get than I first realized.  Much of the brass is re-used, which is good news for landfills but bad news for ammunition artists.  As costs have gone up, shooting ranges are more and more apt to recycle the spent casings or sell them as scrap.

I live near a large, deserted desert where people like to shoot things.  There’s probably millions of ammo casings all over the sagebrush, but fighting the rattlesnakes and 120 degree heat will have to wait until I become really desperate.

This would be a good time to mention that I don’t have much experience with guns, or shooting them, or really anything about them except that when a loaded one shows up in Act 1 it needs to get fired in Act 3.

I enjoy that a simple mechanism can be so controversial among thoughtful, considerate, and generally educated people.  Cell phones, for example,  have a much more complicated technological infrastructure and design, yet they don’t evoke nearly the emotional response that guns do.  Forget presidential debates -- lets hear Yoko Ono and Charlton Heston verbally duke it out on gun control with Larry King moderating.  What a ripe area for discussion.

There are a few artists out there who work with modern weapons as a medium, and very few who make furniture from them.  I recently ran across this lamp in Copenhagen, although I think the trigger should have been wired to turn it on and off:

Also see:


http://alfarrow.com/reliquaries/

http://sashaconstable.co.uk/projects/peace-art

http://weburbanist.com/2009/01/05/20-artworks-of-war-bizarre-gun-and-bullet-art/

Ammo Table, Part 1

I get a lot of questions about how I get my ideas for sculptures and furniture.  I have yet to find a way to describe my creative process simply or concisely, hence this journal to show my internal (and external) wrestling matches that bring about a new piece.

Recently I’ve been thinking about how to choose what materials to use for building tables.  Michael Pollan started his fantastic book ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ with the simple question:  “What’s for dinner?”  Possible answers have expanded greatly in the past 100 years.

Similarly, the vast array of materials that can be formed into a flat surface for a table have also multiplied.  Plastic, concrete, metal, wood, glass, Styrofoam cups, etc, are all readily available as are the tools to form them.  Each material has its own personality.  But, like blind dates, personality only goes so far.

I tend to gravitate toward repurposing materials that are imbued with some sort of emotion, and to use them in large multiples.  I also look for materials that are available where I work and low-cost.  Here’s a diagram to illustrate what I mean:

So, now I’m off to find 10,000 small-arms ammunition casings.  Any ideas?