Zero residency hours
This week was the last week before spring break over at Perpich, and it was the beginning of their "interim" period in which the students de-install the current gallery show and the senior students begin work on their retrospectives, which is like a collection of mini galleries where each student can show work from their time at Perpich. Perpich stresses student involvement and engagement in the gallery and show process, and being that I was a student at Perpich a few years ago and have seen the process, Jeremy told me I could take a couple weeks off for interim and spring break, as there wouldn't be much for teachers to do.
This came at a pretty fortuitous time, as we're starting to get into the actual "making" portion of most of my studio classes this semester. My current studio classes are Public Art, Art in Community and Working with the Collection (in which we are "in residency" at the MIA). All of the classes have been amazing so far, but all have been pretty discussion, reading and research focused to this point; Public Art has had us creating mock responses to calls for work, Art in Community has centered around discussion, community meetings and workshops, and Working with the Collection is structured like a grad seminar and has involved lots of meetings, research and exploration. A big draw for me in taking Public Art, though, was the chance to build stuff that would go out in the world somewhere, in this case a piece for MCADs sculpture garden.
Thus I commenced building this week with the casting of a large concrete cube. Its one of a number of objects I'll be installing in the garden as part of a multi-piece installation that abstracts objects from my fathers photography studio. In my work, I'm interested generally in structures that people create that allow us to (re)tell or (re)create stories, experiences, images or things. I think that a lot of this interest comes from observing my fathers studio practice as a commercial photographer; he will build massive, elaborate room size sets and props to perfectly rig and take an image of a shoe, for instance. I'm interested in how these objects and tools allow him to create things, and additionally I am interested in them as purely aesthetic objects; they serve a dual purpose. By taking these creative tools out of the studio and into a public environment, and abstracting them to a point of ambiguity, I want the viewer to have a similar experience to my own; they can begin to create their own relations, narratives and assignments between and for the objects.
All of that is basically a long winded way of getting to the cube, which will be one of three concrete casts based off prop boxes found in his studio. I had never cast concrete before this week, and though I have a good deal of experience and comfort with casting processes, it was honestly a bit frightening (in a good way). I built a roughly 2'x2'x2' box mold, which sounds small but really takes up a pretty decent amount of space. The process of mixing and pouring the concrete is also excitingly messy, as well as being material and labor intensive. I've attached some pictures below; the mold is about three quarters or three 60LB bags of concrete full, and I'm not sure that I want to fill it all the way. The object is monolithic already and the added six inches of height don't seem totally necessary.