I don't post here nearly enough: New Projects fo Seminar

So I haven't posted about art in Months. Yeah, I've been really good at keeping this blog, no wonder no one reads this. Anyway, I'm here in the wee hours of the morning to hopefully fix that. Allow me to elaborate on what the hell I'm supposedly doing these days.

Taken from my seminar blog: http://jmcvey.net/sylva/

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“Legos”

I’m going to call this methods “Legos” for the time being, it’s catchy enough. The original sketches for this project involved various block shapes stacked up on top of each other, slowly becoming more distant from each other vertically. To give you a visual in lieu of the obvious lack of photography, it’s like falling tetris blocks. The idea was to take actual legos or perhaps pieces of wood and glue them to a large acrylic board to give it that “free floating” appeal. Unfortunately, this does not seem all that likely. It might be possible to make the image digitally, print it on vellum and have the semi-transparent appeal work for what it was worth, but that might seem a tad boring.

Then I started working with actual legos and then this train wreck started to look half decent. Markus Raetz did a sculpture that was the word “YES” from one perspective. When turned around, the shapes realigned and made the word “NO.” I am rather taken with the playful nature of many of his works, so I tried to do something like it without attempting to completely rip off his work. So far, I haven’t had a much luck as I would have hoped. There is only so much I can do with lego blocks. I shouldn’t try to make a transition piece since it would too close to the original piece I’m basing this on, I prefer not have seen as a rip off. At least, not right away. I have been contemplating moving up to Duplo or perhaps actual pieces of lumber.

“Speech”

And here we have yet another idea that I have been playing with for some time now since early last March, perhaps even earlier than that. Taking “speech” or perhaps a large amount of letters and words and having the letters act as small fragments of an image as they are shaded differently. The finished image is made up of various different sheets that all together make the image, much like an old animation cel. I’ve made pieces like this before, so I know there is a larger success rate for this approach. However, the trick for this one is making sure I’m doing something new rather than what I have been doing. I have been considering making it into a sort of assembly, bringing the flat image out to at a 2-D perspective. This would require thin mounting board, preferably something I can cut into without too much trouble. That particular approach to this method might be a tad pretentious of me, I’m still playing around with it. It’s very similar to Christopher Burnett’s “Sprawlcode”, which takes what I’ve done a step further by having each letter or character have it’s own individual color, which I believe is at least possible for me to attempt. Whether or not it’s even nessessary has yet to be decided. Here is the second “Speech” piece I made with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. (Please pardon the watermark on the image below)

“Bars”

This is one of the earlier ideas I came up with. It starts with an image, a photograph would be a better example. That photo is cut into various strips which are then lined back up with each other to form a fragmented remainder of the original. The strips would cross over each other close enough to recreate the image minimally but far enough to have large spaces in between some strips. This one is going to be attempted small first, just to see whether it can be done and hopefully translated to a bigger format if there is some success to be had. This one feels like it will be a lot of fun to make, let’s hope I’m right.

“Explosive Diagram Gundam Model”

This is exactly what it sounds like. The idea involves taking a Gundam Model kit (perferable a RG or MG level, 1/100 scale would be ideal) and creating a physical explosive diagram from the various pieces used to create it. For those who might not have an idea of what I am talking about, this is an explosve diagram:

What I would need to do is find a material that would be thin like wire, only as translucent as fishing line to better establish that “free floating” appearance. What ideally this would turn out to become is half finished, normal assemblage while the other half had pieces floating out from different lengths much like the diagram. If it’s hard to get a visual of this in your head, I apologize since the idea is still a little raw. I have yet to find a model kit that would best suit my purposes for this approach, but that shouldn’t prove to be too difficult.

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So there we go, even manage to get the pictures there too. Ain't I wonder? I have been told my work has been nothing more than the development of "effects", making my projects nothing but soul-less shams. I'm not going to deny that there is no philosophy for any of these projects and I'm going to be frank, I don't really care. My project is the exploration of methods, it's the process of discover process. It feels like I'm building a body just waiting for someone to throw something inside and make it whole. But then we have the question "Why don't you give your terrible homunculus a soul good sir?" I would respond "Why should I? And if I did, what am I supposed to put in there?"

Despite this jibber-jabber , I've got to get cracking on making some actual art for this. I've behind on almost everything it seems and to make matters worse I've screwed up my sleeping pattern. Oh well, FOR PROGRESS!