Open to the Public (or at least my backyard)

Tough week.  Public art, a team based competition?  An installation site I don’t have access too?

I probably deliberated as much on how to address these inconsistencies as the actual solution to the challenge.

In New York, at the site of an installation ‘garden’ of rocks and chain link fence, was the challenge.  Make a meaningful work of public art.  This time, artists were separated into two groups of 4, and have twice the normal time to complete.

Needless to say, no chance of making a meaningful, well constructed public art piece in two days.

I selected my backyard as my location, quite a bit different than what was given to the show artists.  For team members, I will only have myself (and some additional help from Yasmin, Logan, Connor, and Lisa.  Connor even made his own maquettes in the video!)  My piece echos the organic nature of the greenery in the backyard, arching shapes that convey a sense of plant stems, perhaps tuber related growths jumping out of the rest of the plants.

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I’m a bit disappointed with the result.  The size and complexity of a 3D public art piece, and reality of a day job and after hours opportunity is a tough mix.  Extra time for the contestants was nice, but I couldn’t really double my time; also no additional team members here.  Granted that might make it easier to operate.  Add to that 95°+ temperature days in the garage and all and all it wasn’t a fun project.

Scaling up the piece from the maquette was close, but it lost something in the scaling.  Quality of construction was somewhat hampered by the available materials, and I wasn’t keen on spending too much on this installation piece that could not be realistically used anywhere else or stored.  Given the freedom the contestants had — I would have gone with metal.

Time Lapse Video:

Side note on Erik’s departing comment.  Just because he didn’t get any of his ‘ideas’ into the work doesn’t mean it wasn’t his piece.  You just can’t ‘opt’ out of a team effort like that.  In the end his failure to participate in his own work was his own doing, and he paid for it.

Generica (Art That Moves You)

Once again I charge into the competition that Bravo’s art-based reality TV show Work of Art, the Next Great Artist has fostered.  While not really a participant, I can insert my myself secondarily into the show by attempting the same assignments they are given, in as similar conditions as is reasonable for a working dad living outside New York.

The challenge for this week:

The saying goes, art imitates life.  And for this challenge, we gave you all a journey through New York to the Audi Forum.  We want to you use that experience as inspiration for a work of art.  It can be anything you saw or did, its that simple.

Well I didn’t have the luxury of a trip through New York for my inspiration… what I had instead was my way to work in the morning.  If there was any consolation, at least I had an Audi to go in.

My inspiration comes from the effect of Urban Sprawl: we now live in a homogeneous America, where unique characteristics of geographical locations are practically nonexistent.   To buffer this idea, I drew on childhood memories of handheld, manual ‘car race’ games.  These games would have a car on the top window, and inside a strip of paper with a race course could be turned to give the impression of a moving car.  Combined with a bleak colored Hopper-esque paintings of franchised, you get my entry to the challenge.

Hopper's Sunday Morning

Ideas:

Scaling for the final piece

Time Lapse:

A Shock to the System

Oil

This is so tough to wait a week to see what the show’s results are like, but I’ve managed to wait until finishing my piece again.  I wonder what it would be like to get course corrections based on the other artists’ directions.  It’s so common for me to have eureka moments when watching what their solutions are using.

The assignment?

For your challenge, we want you to create your own shocking piece of art.

Solution:

The image of a baby coated in oil is intended to suggest memorable images of oil-coated wildlife caused by oil spills.  The use of a baby form serves two purposes — it makes these tragedies more personal to the viewer, and acts as a symbol of our future as a whole.

Is it alive or dead?  Is it too late to make better choices about our impact on the environment?

Compare against the show’s artwork:

Work of Art – Photos – Episode 4: Rate the Work | Bravo TV Official Site.

For a quick synopsis of the show, with some dead on observations, check this out.

Thought Process:

For the past 60+ days we have been constantly hearing about the oil spill in the Gulf and what it might mean for the environment and for people on the Gulf Coast.  Despite all the imagery of spewing deep water pipes, oil slicks and matted pelicans, we haven’t done much — who among us has even tried to change their driving practices as a result of this?  What would it take for us to change our habits?  I decided to take the oil slicked bird imagery to a hyperbole.

How is babby formed?

I was able to avoid spending any additional money on materials, I was able to use the clay and sand bought for the Shape of Things to Come episode.  The baby would be made small scale in clay, and the sand with a background would be the ‘beach’ backdrop.  I had to go with a diorama like scale because the short timescale and locality of these assignments prevents me from going to the beach or buying a plastic baby doll.

Overall I found the original plan of side-on photos of the figurine with the sea background didn’t look ‘baby’ enough.  I was happy about the Golden tar gel with black acrylic making a passable tar-oil look:

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False Starts:

Some ideas that didn’t make the grade:

• Large, inflated penises with a model hugging a black one.

This was kind of a knee jerk reaction to having to make something shocking, and didn’t hold up well against other ideas.  It’s clear that the judges have an appreciation for work that is personal and bears some relationship to the artist.

• Traditional Still Life with candies and an amputated toe as a statement about Obesity and Diabetes.

This would be a good vehicle for displaying technical capabilities, however doesn’t relate too much to me.  Plus I’m not sure how strong the causal relationship between sweets and Diabetes is.

Side note:  Simon de Pury finally gave some indication of overall time for assignments when he came for the mid-critique — they had met Andres Serrano that morning.  Sounds like they then have over 12 hours per assignment, getting at least from 11:59am until midnight to complete.  And in a reference on a youtube clip, China Chow basically said that they do it all in 18 hours.  So there it is — guess I should have done a little research to clarify!