A Cube Can Lean (Week 8)

Last week was very eventful but at the sacrifice of making work.  It all started out strong in the studio but some great events just took control later in the week.  It must be related to fall break.  You get all that time to be in the studio and then school just rips it away from you.  I am really looking forward to winter break.  One entire month to be in the studio outside of a few family and holiday adventures.  My fear is that Battelle will be closed and powered down for a period of that time.

Anyways, the early part of the week involved me problem solving the larger gridded wheel.  I am going to just have to install the thing directly to the wall because the weight of the object pulls it away from the wall at the top and towards at the bottom.  It is a problem with the plywood that I have used.  Too flimsy. My solution was a simple shim to angle the axle upwards a hair.  That seemed to true things up a bit.  After that I gave it a spin and enjoyed my work a bit.  I will likely match paint to the shadow and paint the steel grid in order to melt 2D and 3D space together.

The next thing I got myself into was a leaning cube design that I had been toying around with.  Photos of the first attempt are in last weeks blog post.  The difference with the second version is that it had a bottom side made of a steel square instead of created with a shadow from a spot light.  I’m just going to go ahead al make fifty of them.  They are really great optically and I imagine that a few more then one trained onto a single point in a gallery space or in an interesting environment could be pretty spectacular.

I have started fleshing out the mock gallery space a bit more.  The walls are painted white and I am looking for a mock floor material.  I will have the mock completed by this time next week.

The later part of my week has been filled with other sorts of productive distractions.  I allowed Ismeal to use my side of the studio for his first critique of the year.  The way the space and his work go together is pretty amazing.  All the rust and texture of the stone and steel paired with his Pollock like treatement of paint and color added to his spiritual and often menacing compositions.  Since then my studio space has been on hold I have chosen to dedicate some time to writing and reading.

Friday’s lecture presented by visiting artist Sarah Mattes was profound, and for some possibly existential.  I find it to be a beautiful thing when artists figure out a way to just play and to allow that behaviour to become the product of their creation.  It is such a liberating thing to see and incredibly encouraging in a professional universe that can be rather oppressive if you let it be.  I related to her presentation from an academic perspective.  As a child, my parents placed me into Columbus Montessori Education Center.  Schooling of this sort revolves around experiential learning by just simply doing.  Starting in preschool and kindergarten, children learned complex geometry with shapes that when added together made other geometric shapes and taught mathamatical concepts.  These shapes are also explored between 2D and 3D space through pairings with physical objects thus creating a cognitive relationship.  I’ll never forget the color of blue that the shapes are painted.  Learning was quite literally placed in our hands at a very young age and relational awareness between many disciplines was encouraged immediately.  It all started with experiencing the physical world.  There were no desks.  Learning by doing and just simply trying, because who is out there in the universe telling you not to other than yourself.