Just four quick photographs this time plucked from various adventures years ago. These images are all featured in the exhibit I have at the Oldham County History Center and augment my display of sculptures and the fake food I’ve collected from the banks of the Ohio River. When I make a figure from Styrofoam and other found materials…I’m actually more interested in the resulting photograph than I am the sculptural model itself. It’s the context of where this stuff is made that I find important. This piece was entitled “Moon Maid at Sun Set” and was as large as a person and eventually washed away by the river.
In most cases, the photographs are the only document I have that these things existed in the first place. The sculptures have a way of eventually disappearing. The image above records three different figures made at different times that have come together for just this shot. The figure that has fallen over…I can recall the title I had for that one, it was…”My Hand Grenade of a Heart” and did feature a plastic hand grenade I found and embedded in this figure’s chest. I guess it eventually exploded.
Ah…”Orange-Eyes” made during a blistering hot summer day on the exposed fossil beds at the Falls of the Ohio. Funny how you remember certain things! The eyes are foam fishing bobbers and the mouth was made from the outer hull of a walnut. I recall liking how the root from the stump this figure is posed against created the sensation of an extra upturned arm. All these images in this post were made during my analog days. There’s nothing tricky about the photography. Just snapshot photos taken to the drug store and printed on a 4″ x 6″ inch format. The photos were an extension of the idea that this was something anybody could do that didn’t require great technical knowledge or mastery. In the current exhibition, these drug store prints were scanned by a friend of mine, digitized and blown up to approximately 30″ x 40″ inches. My friend was in the business of creating courtroom displays that were used as supporting evidence. Seemed appropriate to what I was doing and I had a small grant through the Kentucky Arts Council to do this.
The “Dog Playing with a Ball” was originally accompanied by an old woman figure I made. She was wearing a fancy hat made from a Styrofoam bait bucket I found. Both the woman and her dog were playing near the banks of the river. Eventually, my 35mm SLR camera gave up the ghost and I was thrust into the digital age. The bulk of the Falls projects I have made are still from the analog world and in their own way document a transition that occurred with technology. Of late, I have also become intrigued by the correspondence I think exists between a bead of polystyrene and a pixel. The internet has become a substitute river where images become tumbled and changed as they bump along electronically from place to place. You just never know where this stuff might surface on the web and what might happen to it in the interim.
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