Black Armored Structure

This piece got finished yesterday, and its first exposure will be in a December group exhibition in the ICON Gallery, Fairfield, Iowa.
It is aluminum and steel, mounted on pine and is 26" x 8.5" x 4". As I said to a friend, this is probably going to be a difficult piece for most viewers - as in, "What can I say about it?" No need to say anything, really, just tell me whether you like it or not. It is a piece that I feel is exploring the leading (bleeding?) edge of my aesthetic and deals with my struggle with the concerns of 3D art in a post-minimalist milieu. Even a title for a piece like this is difficult. Does it say to much? Too little? Should the piece have a baseor sit directly on the surface? On this last issue, I decided that since the scale of the piece is not such that it can rest directly on the floor, some kind of base was a necessity.

New metal piece

This is an aluminum piece that is about 3/4 done. I've got a few pieces to add to the exterior and some structural work inside to make it easier to mount on a base. My plan is to paint it flat black and then rough up the surface with abrasives in the manner of my other recent aluminum sculpture. This is the first piece that I'll finish since finding out that I'll be participating in a 2-person show at a nearby art center, the Buchanan in Monmouth. The other artist will be Josh Bindewald, a recent MFA graduate of Bradley University. This is a really nice opportunity for me since I have so much respect for the quality of Josh's prints and paintings. The show will run mid-February to mid-March of 2012.

Oh yeah, about the Keister Corporation . . .

The above photo is an example of the third type of sculpture that I do, called "Art Machines", ostensibly "manufactured" by the "Keister Corporation", a mythical company. There haven't been any new examples of this body of work since I started writing this blog, so I've not mentioned them previously. However, having sold a couple of them last weekend, and needing to replace the "Terrorist Detector", I made this variation of that piece, and it is called the "Evil Detector". This is a reflection of my belief that we are threatened from within, not just by terrorists, but by other groups that have had an impact on our government and hence on our lives. This is a way for me to work off some of the frustration I am feeling about the way things are headed.

The Keister Corporation, however, is a broader concept than just that, and has a rather extensive backstory which I'll summarize as follows: I like to imbue the pieces I call “Art Machines” with narrative elements, something that just doesn’t find a line of expression in my other sculptural mediums. The narrative allows me to gently satirize science, engineering, politics and consumerist culture. Produced by the “Keister Corporation”, the pieces are portrayed as devices to solve a specific problem or address the needs of a certain population. The metal tags, commonly attached to “serious” machinery of the 1920s to roughly the 1950s, are of my own devising and continue the Keister Corporation narrative.

The common matrix the pieces share is the box structure, but that is usually violated in one or more dimensions by elements of the piece. In addition to the box itself, the pieces consist of recycled and repurposed materials from a variety of sources. The brass structural elements are meant to convey qualities of solidity, structural integrity and quality of manufacture. They are fun to build, but somewhat beyond the limits of some people's concept of "ART". Hmm, maybe that's what makes them fun . . .

2nd finished piece this week

Once I got the alabaster piece "Exurban" finished, it seemed possible to complete a half-finished metal piece that had been languishing in my metal studio for several months. It meant spending some of the nicest days this year inside, but with the show coming up tomorrow, I thought I'd try it. These Black Mountain pieces have been getting progressively larger, and this one is 32" long, mounted on an oak base.

First half of the sawed piece

Well, it's not an entire half because about 1/4 of this side broke off soon after sawing the big piece in half. But it's done and mounted on a piece of green marble. I've titled it "Exurban". I still have the other half to finish, but I find myself being drawn into the realm of metal again. Hmm. . .

Yep, it's the same piece . . .

In working on this half of the stone I sawed in half, it became clear that this half needed to be vertical. I resisted this at first because it meant finishing the bottom to be consistent with the rest of the piece. Finally, I knew that I had to do it, and I really like the result. I'm now excited about the piece again and will probably finish it within a week or so and then go on to resolve the other half of the original sculpture as a second piece. That one, I'm guessing, will retain a horizontal attitude. Oh, one more thing - I did go ahead and remove the dark red section of stone that had been at the top. I did this by cutting a notch in the stone where the red part had been, and I think it added some real dynamism to the piece, especially in the new vertical position.

Change of plans. . .

As this piece neared the finish - I actually had started to sand it - I finally faced the fact that I didn't like some aspects of it, notably the "unfinished" center. I realized early on that I would not be able to bring the inaccessible inside portions to a smooth state and had planned to leave them rough, finished only by a toothed chisel. Unfortunately, this focused too much attention on that unfinished part, so I decided to take the extreme step of sawing the piece in half to create two separate pieces that could be finished on both sides, but still leaving the bottoms rough. Interestingly, I ended up with three pieces when the end broke off one of the sides when I started working on it. At this point, the whole project is unresolved, but I have started working on one of the halves (the one whose end broke off) and a shot of it is shown above along with some photos of the "surgery".
Now my dilemma is this: without the other side with its extensive areas of dark red stone, the lone area of that color looks isolated and out of place. So, do I modify the top profile by carving it off or leave it?