Sculpture

Image and Object after Gabriel Orozco

Hands 1Hands 2

 

For this project I wanted to explore the work of another artist. I was interested in what it meant to quote or copy someone else’s work. The work I chose was Gabriel Orozco’s My Hands are My Heart. I wanted to quote this work because I like the fact that it is an interdisciplinary, that is, it is both performative and sculptural. My goal was to change the meaning of Orozco’s original piece by adding my own elements to the work.

Untitled By Forrest Humphrey

Artist Statement and Reflections on Vandalism and Conceptual Art

It has been nearly one hundred years since the publication of the “Richard Mutt Case” and the showing of Marcel Duchamp’s fountain. During the intervening years the idea of the quotidian art object has been presented and represented, frame has been manipulated, destroyed, and rebuilt so many times that this type of art action has become almost a cliché. With this in mind, I was interested, both as an artist and student of art history, in adding to this conversation in a productive and interesting way.

My initial thought was to expand on the original Duchamp idea of bringing reality into the gallery. My idea was to bring the gallery, so to speak, into reality or into the larger world. The stickers are meant to represent traditional gallery wall text and by placing them in unusual contexts I wanted to highlight the importance of this text as a signifier or designator of what is art. I wanted to explore what makes us see an object as art, what are the indicators or clues that allow us to make the conceptual leap from everyday object to art piece. For Duchamp, this meant inserting the object directly into the gallery context. In the past hundred years, however, so much art from street art, to social practice, to culture jamming, has moved out of the gallery context and into the world. My intention was to follow this trend and see if I could bring the gallery into the world as well. Although this is a simple concept the execution ended up being quite difficult. There were a number of unanticipated ramifications to putting my stickers on the world. I ran into a number of issues around appropriation, vandalism, and anonymity.

At first I was excited about the idea of appropriation. I thought it was potentially interesting to claim someone else’s art as my own. The problem emerged when, on our weekend trip to Detroit, I decided to appropriate a number of graffiti pieces in the abandoned buildings we visited. Appropriating the work of my peers or artists in galleries is one thing, but this felt wrong somehow. I felt that I was coming from a position of power and privilege and imposing myself on a space that I had no right to be in.

Vandalism became an issue, especially when I considered putting the stickers up here on campus. There is no conceptual usefulness in making the college’s cleaning staff scrape my stickers off the walls. Additionally, from a legal standpoint these are certainly vandalism. This is an interesting component of the piece; it moves the conversation into the realm of street art which has some interesting elements of public art and space that are worth exploring.

The final potential problem with this piece is anonymity or lack thereof. It was a conscious choice to put my name on the stickers but I did feel somewhat uncomfortable posting my name everywhere, particularly in a small community like Yellow Springs. I think it would be more effective to post these stickers in a place where I am completely unknown.

Junk Intervention 2014

Artist Statement

This project seeks to explore and document emergent processes as art making. I am interested in routine and mundane activities, and things that occur without conscious thought. These include daily activities such as putting on shoes or eating. Repetition is an important element of these types of activities and this will be reflected in my sculptural practice.  This interest refers back to the automatic writing and drawing processes used by the Surrealists as a way to access their subconscious. Although I am drawing inspiration from the surrealists, I am less interested in unlocking the secrets of the subconscious than in observing and documenting these processes themselves.

This project will attempt to create a context where mindful artistic activity can occur. My goal is to create a situation that gives me the opportunity to create and explore the creative process without the burden of having to plan each piece and think about how it is in conversation with the larger art world. To do this I will create a small studio space in McGregor and spend several hours creating work in public while simultaneously documenting it. This work will consist of found materials donated by the community and I have invited community members to participate in the process and potentially discover an opportunity to share in mindful production.

In each of the previous projects I explored the idea of documentation, and this will become a critical part of this piece as well. For the Orozco project I explored the idea of quoting another artist and documenting a material that changes over time. For the Alys project I attempted to document the process of creating an artwork. For the Katchadaurian piece I wanted to document the process of idea generation over the period of a week. For this final piece I will combine my research on emergent processes with my previous work on documentation. Additionally I am interested in anchoring this piece to a specific space thereby, incorporating the element of site into my work. The McGregor hallway space is interesting because it is centrally located and has the potential for many people to interact with it. This piece has several interesting functions in a public space, particularly a workplace. It has the potential to create an interruption in the normal flow of the work day, which could create a sense of novelty and give people an opportunity to participate in an activity that is not work related or outcome based.

The goal is to use the basic formal qualities of sculpture such as form, color, texture, perspective, in new and more effective ways. I will explore how materials and forms can change and how meaning can potentially emerge from form. For example, I will examine how a piece of cloth can function both as a ground or substrate and as an object in and of itself. Exploring these ideas in a public context will allow me to engage with the intentionality and mindfulness that I find in performance. Additionally, it is critical that I understand the power of documentation to recontextualize a piece of sculpture. For example, I plan to use photo documentation to turn this work from a three-dimensional object into a two-dimensional image. The documentation also functions as a mode of self-reflection. I will use my photographs as another way of examining the work and increasing my self-awareness.  I propose to discover a new set of formal terms, a new artistic language. This new language will be a tool for creating and talking about work in the future. It will serve as research to inform my future creative work.  Also, it will help in the development of my personal aesthetic which will help as I attempt to create a body of work.