Assignment #1

Laser Configurations

For this assignment I wanted to transform an object into something new. I started thinking about negative/positive relationships and and how I could hit the object hood of an object from one to the other in an interesting way. This led me to consider the cracks in the asphalt I see every day on my bike commute to and from school.

I see these cracks every day and to me they often take on anthropomorphic forms, becoming creatures or monsters from some imagined world. I began by taking pictures of them as I was on my commute.

Next I brought images into Photoshop where I traced the cracks with the brush tool. This was the step I am most conflicted about as it is where I began to make formal decisions on the objects I was going to create. I wanted the images to read as cracks, but my own biases began to inform the work.

I then brought the images into Illustrator where I converted them into paths.

I made a number of these cracks in Illustrator as the process became quite fast after I defined the workflow. This expediency allowed me to experiment with materials. This image shows the design being cut into cardboard.

This is me playing with presentation concepts. In this image I am laying the cutouts on a Lightbox I made previously.

Playing with the material removed from the cutout. These are kinda cool.

Because I was thinking about anthropomorphism, I wanted to give the cutouts some dimensionality. I used heat to soften and melt the acrylic objects I made. This step is where the project really began to resolve itself.

The dimensionality made the work sculptural for me. So in in thinking about presentation I began considering the materiality of the objects. I was curious how light would behave with the various objects so I brought out my projector. I liked it, but this felt like an installation. I wanted to reduce the size and distill the sculpture down to essentials.

I had some concrete rubble lying around my studio and figured that would work as a stand-in for the outside, built word. That was where I found the cracks in the first place. I started playing with placement of the objects. They were beginning to feel like sculptures.

Still liked the idea of video as a material in the work.