Reference to a Paper Clip Critique Week

Part of me wanted to create a sculpture out of glass in the same way that the shopping carts are constructed which would hang in a space for a time and then crash to the ground.  In the end we would be left with shadows on the walls and a pile of remains which would refer to an object that used to exist in a place.  This was my plan until I discovered that glass is really springy.

This week's critique is a display of experiments around the idea of studying references of place.  Instead of steel I am working with glass and I am also working with single lines of material rather than lines of material that make up a greater from.  I am manipulating paper clips rather than constructing shopping carts.  For this week’s critique I am displaying kinetic glass structures paired with static shadows painted on the walls.  In the future I intend to build surfaces that gyrate or vibrate at seemingly random times when all of the space seems still.  The glass sculptures will then shake in the space until they find stillness.  Instead of developing the surfaces for this critique I will be flicking the objects during the show.

With the kinetic aspect in mind I had to come up with a way of displaying this new work.  In stillness, what is constant is the shadow of the object object on the wall among other things.  I have created a two space installation.  The open area is an experiment with color.  I chose to complimentary colors , an orange and an aqua, with the thought that the pairing would create a shadow on the wall that vibrated visually.  I thought that this would be an interesting pairing with the kinetic aspect of the paper clips.  Having completed the background colors and pulling the tape off the wall I am attracted to the white shadows in the colorful spaces and am having a hard time deciding if I want to paint the shadows in with the opposite color.  I may or may not do this step, we’ll see.

The second space is the small room on the second floor.  I have painted that room a black of both a glossy and flat matte finish.  There are two shadows in the room.  One of them is going to be a gloss shadow on a flat matte background while the other wraps around the corner on a gloss wall and will be left white.  I will also be activating the sculpture in that space during critique.  There are still a lot of little details that need to be cleaned up and filled in but for the most part this is what it will look like.  Also for those interested in the election a group of us have made a movie for the second Crit Theory course based on the political stage.  Here it is below.