Barbie

I just finished 'Barbie', a shell of welded bicycle chain inspired both by the book "Cinderella Ate My Daughter" and an inane talking Barbie head found at the local thrift store.

Fatherhood Art

My best sculpture yet, although it's an on-going collaborative project:

I've been collecting some work that seems to somehow resonate with the adventure of fatherhood.  Other than that similarity between them, I'm not sure what all these pieces may say in aggregate -- perhaps it will require another few years (or decades) of collecting to find the themes they share.

A photo of my Grandfather and namesake on his ranch in Waco, TX by Michael Norman.

A print by Jonathon Baker of SLC.  jonathonbaker.blogspot.com

A block print by Kurt Gross.

Another block print I got at the SLC Gallery Roll by M. Delforto.  http://www.galleryroll.com/

Photo by Zak Elstein.

Photo by Gentry Underwood.  http://photo.gentry.io/grownups/

The Ambiguous Family, completed

This sculpture represents a family.

               

The idea for this sculpture started with my involvement with the gay rights movement here in Utah and the legislation that attempted to define what a ‘family’ was and was not.  Specifically, I wanted to represent a group with ambiguous genders in a defensive posture.  What better way to demonstrate a family under siege than to use a material that has been battered, worn, and discarded . . . like hoods from wrecked trucks?

The fascinating thing about this project is that the more I talked to people about it, the more I saw how everyone on both sides of this issue felt like their concept of family was being attacked.  How interesting is it that we’re all at each others’ throats even when we have the same basic joys and fears?


To see the process of creating this sculpture, look here:


Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7






This sculpture is part of the Lawn Gnomes Eat Your Hearts Out exhibit through the Salt Lake Art Center.  See more information about bus, bike, and walking tours here:


http://www.slartcenter.org/?page_id=249

 . . . and a Google map of all the sculptures across SLC here:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=202526600326316503418.0004a13b990f61e4bf3c8&ll=40.665535,-111.868286&spn=0.250003,0.439453&z=11&source=embed

To hear the artists talk about their work, call 801-349-3498 and enter the number of the sculpture (the Ambiguous Family is 212).  Each sculpture has a sign by it explaining this process.

The Ambiguous Family, part 7

The Ambiguous Family, made from wrecked truck hoods, in the works . . .

The Ambiguous Family, Part 6

Prototypes of connection methods and cutting techniques from a donor  truck hood.

Connections and edge treatments are important.  I realized I don’t have enough information or experience with different concepts of alternative families to make a good artistic decision on what method to use to attach the truck hoods to the structure.


I plan to interview and visit a few folks in the next several weeks and hopefully that will help give me some resolution about how to continue.

The Ambiguous Family, part 5

While working on this sculpture over the past week, the issue of gay marriage and the question of biological determinance of homosexuality have been in the local and national news.

Boyd Packard, one of the highest-ranking Mormon church leaders, condemned same-sex marriage and insisted that same-sex attraction is a lifestyle that can be changed through prayer.  Previously, Packer had authored a pamphlet that advocated violence against gay people .  Many have criticized the LDS church’s stance on homosexuality as a contributing factor to Utah’s disproportionate rate of gay teen suicides.

Protest outside the gargantuan LDS office buildings

4500 people were estimated to attend the protest

I traveled to a silent protest orchestrated several days later in response to the LDS position on gay rights.  It struck me how many of the participants were youth from the community; my previous experience attending rallies and protests had relatively few youth participating.

In national news, the Supreme Court is also hearing a case that pits free speech against privacy in a case involving anti-gay protestors at the funeral of an American soldier killed in Iraq.

What, exactly, does all this have to do with a hunk of welded steel taking shape in my shop?  I’ve found that while working on any project I’m making thousands of decisions every minute.  Just a single brush stroke on the finish of a piece involves considering the type of brush, its angle, pressure, length, etc.  So, the decisions that surround actually fabricating sculpture multiply exponentially.

7 ft sculpture structure awaiting its skin of reclaimed pickup truck hoods

One of the larger decisions I’ve facing now deal with methods of attaching the plates of metal from the truck hoods onto the skeletal structure of the piece.  Welding, riveting, bolts – each method imparts a different visual language and emotional impact on the folks looking at the sculpture.  All of the recent news makes me lean toward attaching the plates in a way that stresses the defensive posture non-traditional families under attack have to take to protect themselves and their children.  

The Ambiguous Family, part 4

While continuing work on the Ambiguous Family sculpture, I had NPR on in my shop.  Completely serendipitously, the program was “The End of the Macho Man?”  on Talk of the Nation.  Neal Conan was interviewing Guy Garcia  and Hanna Rosin , two authors who have written about the changing role of men.  The basic consensus was that jobs often held by men are disappearing (manufacturing heading overseas, for example) and jobs traditionally held by women are increasing (nursing and teaching).  This labor shift, along with data showing that more women are enrolled in higher education than men, portends a shift in men’s roles in society.  That shift means that the provider and protector roles that men have traditionally had, and had been modeled by their fathers and grandfathers, will need to be met in other ways now that many men are unemployed or will shift to ‘unmanly’ jobs.

It got me to wondering if the arguments against gay marriage and hostility towards gay couples are fueled by a societal fear of the changing role of men.  It seems that two men having a family would be a very obvious lightning rod for latent angst over job, direction, and gender role loss.  Of course this in no way excuses the blatant bigotry involved with anti-gay proponents, but it does offer a theory of how it got that way.

NPR story:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130190244&ft=1&f=5

Guy Garcia’s The Decline of Men:

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/books/item_e2dpetSthO3HZcGrWR2ZUK

Hanna Rosin’s The End Of Men:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/

The Ambiguous Family, part 3

“ . . . when asked if gay couples and pets count as family, 30 percent said pets count but not gay couples.”

--MSNBC

The concept of ‘family’, apparently, has many meanings to many people.  That certainly makes it a good topic to explore for artwork that is intended to start conversations.

We simply cannot ask what a family is without examining gender roles.  Take a look at this weeks’ Newsweek cover story: “Man Up: The Traditional Male Is an Endangered Species.  It’s Time to Rethink Masculinity”

Another project that I stumbled upon during my research is the Queer Oral History Project, supported by the Utah Pride Center.  Some of their interviews are available at:

http://vimeo.com/qohp

Touching, chilling, frustrating . . . there’s a range of emotions there.  Highly recommended and informative for anyone who thinks they have the idea of ‘family’ simply defined.

The Ambiguous Family, part 2

What raw material is better to depict families under siege than wrecked truck hoods?  One of my favorite locations for sculptural ideas is the local wrecking yard. 

Specifically, older truck hoods are the best to use – they are bigger than those on cars, tend to be flatter (and yield more ‘blank canvas’, so to speak), have less complicated structural reinforcement to work around, and with a little looking you can find ones that have wonderful rust patterns on them. 

I also recommend a trip to the junk yard for anyone debating a car purchase – the vast majority of vehicles there were from Detroit’s drawing boards.  It may be that GM, Ford & Chrysler are overrepresented in the cars on the road (and thus in the junkyards as well), but my own experience owning several says they were intended to last the life of the loan and that’s it.  But, hats off to them for providing raw material for our artistic foolishness.

In contrast, cardboard makes a difficult prototyping material for sculptures this size.  I felt a little guilty for stealing it from the recycling bins, but then again, maybe I’m just participating in re-recycling.

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