Artist at Exit 0 Riverblog

Two hundred years later, I’m walking the very ground that Lewis and Clark walked in their exploration of this great land.  Our intrepid explorers and their men began and ended their voyage at the Falls of the Ohio.  Although my journey isn’t as grand, nevertheless it has been a process of discovery.  For six years now, I have been walking the length and breath of this park recording what I see, feel, find, and make.  If places have spirits (and I believe they do) I hope this project has been a worthy conduit.  The planet is speaking to us…it’s in our own interests to listen now.

The first image in this story, are some of the “raw materials” I found on my latest outing to the river.  Among the many parts are a Styrofoam cooler, a discarded vacuum cleaner hose, various plastic toy wheels, soda bottles, and well…just plain crap.  This is the stuff that I make my art from.

You can pick up at any point in this blog and see that I use these poor materials to create my own brand of figurative art.  The basic idea is to create a compelling image that speaks to that sense of place as I interpreted that day from means found entirely within the park.  This project involves figuration because I want “people” (our species that includes and is not necessarily limited to the art-interested public) to relate to the work in a basic way.

The second image I’ve identified as being the “Operator” of a device that I’ve constructed from the other found objects.  With a bit of fishing line, I’ve tied a plastic toy engine part to the figure’s head.  Primarily, the figure is Styrofoam, bits of driftwood, plastic, and the eyes are coal.  It’s tough work dragging that hose across the sand, but what is it connected to?

The hose is attached to a machine that extracts more from the planet than it gives back in return.  The Operator is always on the move looking for more resources to turn ultimately back into waste.  This is the second such machine I’ve constructed from debris.  The first was made at the tail-end of my analog days and exits only on print film and color negatives.  I called the first piece the “Nature Extracting Crap Making Machine” and it too had an operator.  In that device, the operator filled a funnel with fresh flowers which were converted into a polystyrene-like substance within the machine’s inner workings.  This is an improved version.

Here are two details.  One shows “product” being created and collected for… who knows what?  No doubt, it will be something we can’t live without.  The lower image is a look at the machine from the opposite side.  It sports some type of radiator to dissipate heat and unseen greenhouse emissions.  This is also the 40Th anniversary of the first moon landing and the machine has a little plastic astronaut on top of it as a tribute.  There were stories in the newspaper this week on how we are now able to see the junk more clearly that we discarded on the moon.  We can send a man to the moon and back, but we can’t….you complete the sentence with the challenge of your choice.

Every once in awhile, you produce too much product or need to clean the machine out.  Fortunately, there are enough holes around that need filling.  It’s a 24/7 job, but somebody has got to do it!