I noticed, the other day, that this older sculpture, titled Letterbox, didn’t ever get on my new www.archart.net website, and while the piece was created sometime in late 2002, probably, it remains one of my strongest pieces, which makes its website absence all the more strange. Now in the hands of a private collector—i.e., someone bought it!—Letterbox was the first in what is an on-again/off-again series that I’m particularly drawn to, and a model for a number of new pieces in the works.

One of my arguments for assemblage sculpture is that media—letters, photos, film strips, slides, documents, and so forth—is a valid new artistic medium (well, really, not all that new, but pretty much since mid-Twentieth Century), along with found objects generally. While there are old such records—think gravestones and the practice of rubbing, old manuscript and books, and ancient artifacts of many types that hold a similar representation—the sheer scope and scale of the traces of our lives today provide for a rich and evocative artistic medium that is largely new. (In a recent New Yorker, there is an article that falls within the magazines “Department of Public Health,” and written by Kathryn Schulz, about death certificates, which date back only around 120 years. The article is a fascinating read.)

What I find especially interesting is that such media provides the sense of record, and that such records represent occasion for strong projection of meaning, by viewers, onto these fragments, hints, and other evidence in our modern life. An excerpt from my artist statement for the Bromfield Art Gallery show still holds up, I think:

My art is made out of the material created in the headlong rush of materialism: recoveries from forgotten trunks, drawers, and boxes, gleanings of estates, flea markets, and tag sales, and the revealed and retrieved from streets, sidewalks, and trash piles. The material includes media—photographs, slides, cards, prints—that are plentiful, to say the least. But there’s more: the written and printed record of personal and public lives is also copious, from the informational sort, such as diaries, letters, books, documents, and magazines, to the many and various recording products, such as films, records, and tapes.

Not surprisingly, these objects are capable of being powerfully infused with nostalgia. After all, our homes and lives have been crammed with such things, and they are part of our shared experience. Even physical objects with which viewers are not personally involved (such as an anonymous fourth-grade class photograph, or an unfamiliar piece of costume jewelry) are likely to have meaning projected on to them by viewers.

In Letterbox, I used cut strips of various letters, mixed, to form collages that are sandwiched in glass panels suspended in a hidden and rather complicated—but stable!—system using mono-filament and springs, among other items, over an upholstered red velvet base. The lighting comes from Christmas lights attached under the top cover, with its cherry wood and ceramic slab top, and which is held up with plate glass panels. The letter strips are not particularly readable (too narrow, for the most part), but people seem to find the fragments intriguing, in part, no doubt, because of the strangely hyper-formal presentation of them.

The image used in this post was used in a gallery one-man show called CONVERGENCE OF THINGS: OBJECTS AS MEDIA—Assemblage, Found Objects, Utility, and Intentional Presentation, at Bromfield Art Gallery, back when it was still at the Thayer Street location in Boston.

The post Letterbox first appeared on arch art.

A lot of my sculpture falls into the category I call “memory boxes,” and I’ve gotten some commissions to make such pieces every now and then. The latest was commissioned by three daughters for their parents’ 60^th birthdays, and it was a great project. Some members of the family had seen a piece I had done for Annie and Steve Lynch, a sort of memento mori of Annie’s mother, a couple of years back, after her passing (Annie’s mother, not Annie!), an end table that contained objects and images from her and their life.

Annie and Steve are dear longtime friends—not to mention patrons, if you will, since they bought some other work of mine, including Letterbox—and I had some sense of Annie’s mom, and a solid sense of their own life together raising their own family as contemporaries. The subjects of the Mahoney commission were at the start of the project complete strangers, and I first wondered how the process would be in that circumstance. The short report is that the process was fun, even thrilling, largely due to the openness of the daughters and friends of the Mahoney family to share stories, images, and objects of significance to Allison Kempe and Dugan Mahoney.  For most of this project, Emily was in London, doing graduate work at the London School of Economics, and we used Skype and email for our meetings.

I pursued a sofa table or console table form, which made sense to Emily, especially as I quizzed her on the likely location for the piece, which you can see fits quite well in the target placement; my own interest in this form had to do with an early idea I had for under-skirt lighting of transparencies, although the first concept was to take stills from home videos and slightly pixelate them for graphic effect. I ended up choosing to use digital and scanned photographs and documents in simple collage, edited from a large number of submissions from the family and printed on a Canon i9900 inkjet.  The lighting fixtures are two T50 compact fluorescent units, toggle-switched and mounted on a side skirt. The inside area under the removable glass top, composed of an upholstered base using clothing fragments reflecting the subjects and objects and photographs and documents, was lit by LED tape under the top skirt frame, and toggle-switched on the side skirt. There is a rectangular translucent Plexiglas cutout in the center of the bottom, lit from the lighting units under the base, to which I secured several dried rose stems.

The wood is cherry, milled and built by me, except for the dining table Cabriole legs, which I get from a specialty supplier. Although I often like to present screw joints, I decided to follow a more traditional furniture look by hiding or covering the screw heads. The finish is a four-time rubbed oil application. The glass top was sized and ordered by me, but shipped directly to a sister who lives nearby in Denver.  I built a shipping crate for the main piece, handing off the work—and meeting Emily for the first time—in the parking lot of Mass MOCA; I put the crate on rolling casters, added handles, and made sure that the TSA could inspect the piece, since Emily was flying out of Logan with the commission.

It was a pleasure to create a piece for those still with us, although the gift was a surprise and I couldn’t go directly to the source, as it were, for information, objects and images, or inspiration. Within the cork-lined skirt interior border, I left a section of the side wall blank, since Allison and Dugan are wished to have many more happy years ahead, and they are welcomed to add new pictures themselves.

The post Mahoney Commission first appeared on arch art.

After quite a while, I’m back in the studio. The house in Housatonic—which saw a complete renovation and rehab, including the building of a nearly 1000 square foot studio dug into the grade on the east side of the house, complete with green roof, and which had been the workshop for much of the house work—is complete (as “complete” as any such project gets), and the space’s purpose has finally been put to its intended use. Although I’ve had a couple of exhibits and had made some art during the last couple of years, I’m now fully operational in the studio. The “Little Lady End Table” is one of the recent pieces completed, as well as a commission I’ll post shortly.

Little Lady end table started with a rather anonymous wood box (20 inches long, by 11 inches deep, by 12 inches wide) that could have held anything, but without any label or stencil to suggest the specific original purpose. The box is mounted on carved Queen Anne legs, with a skirt of maple and trimmed variously, including a multi-wood base and top piece, standing at 30 inches. The interior of the refinished box is upholstered with fabric, with the back covered with some home-made paper I created some years ago that incorporates lace ribbon, and on which an early Nineteenth Century etching of a portrait of a sitting lady—an early form of bourgeoisie art for the burgeoning home. The top of the inner box has a plane of Ethernet and telephone modem cards, and a toggle-switched small incandescent flood lamp (40 watts); several other objects—including a large feather, a tiny bell and some buttons, and the ivory brush plate dug up during earth moving—populate the interior, and another large feather trims the bottom plane and skirt. The top surface has a sheet of marbled paper by a local friend (Lauren Clark), under a plate of glass.

Much of my art involves recycled material, and I’m especially drawn to functional art that takes old boxes and shipping crates as the design starting point, counter-puncher that I am. Often my work has furniture-like elements to it, and Little Lady end table is a good example: Is the piece an assemblage sculpture or is it furniture?

The use of found objects has emerged as a popular medium these days, and despite the New Yorker cartoon of a few years back (man looking at something on a pedestal in a gallery: “Oh great. More found crap.”), the fact is that we live in a world which holds huge amounts of man-made things, and this is a fairly new phenomenon. It really has been only in the last 200-300 years—at least in the developed world—that most people have far more than objects beyond a few homespun clothes and utensils and tools. But today, most parts of the world have people who seem to be drowning in stuff.

Paints and pigments, gems, paper, wood, clay and metals, and people’s voices and bodies, have a longer history as art media, but manufactured material—especially mass-produced objects—have become another type of medium, and, in some fundamental ways, a medium in which, like the air we breathe, we live in. Just think of the ubiquitous media—photos, pictures, text, video, recorded music—that in their overwhelming volume must be strange and bizarre to people who lived as recently as the Eighteen Century. Three hundred years ago, if you had metal cutlery or manufactured clothes, you were among the elite.

An interesting aspect of this change is that for us these mass-produced items tend to be infused with nostalgia—or, at least, nostalgia can be readily projected by us onto them. This makes, I think, a wealth of readily available and powerful meaning, ready metaphors of what it is to be human now.

But wait. Little Lady is also a lamp! Now how much would you pay, as Ron Popeil might say?  Available for only $650, exclusive of shipping. Act now, my friends!

The post Little Lady End Table first appeared on arch art.