In the studio I’m working on a piece titled Phase Transition that utilizes metallized polyester film — also known as reflective Mylar — to play with light’s properties in new ways. This latest experiment builds on my previous work using rigid mirrors with the added benefit of flexible surfaces. The loops here act as concave mirrors that reflect colored light to create a luminous “eye” within each and every loop.
The composition is patterned on a line graph whose script-like rhythm draws the eye from left to right as if across a page. Unlike my earlier pieces that embody a formal dynamism found in Constructivism, this new work takes shape as biomorphic abstraction. Diagrammatic in origin, it nevertheless comes closer to painting than to sculpture.
There is a kinetic aspect to the piece however. Seemingly inert from a distance, the loops sway gently in response to air currents generated by approaching viewers. Interactive in nature, the piece is intended to communicate the phase transition between ice and water, the fluidity of light and reflection, and the phenomena of human perception.
Over the next three months I’ll be teaching my first solo class at Stanford. The course is titled ARTSTUDI 230: Interdisciplinary Art Survey. Geared towards Art majors and minors, the course combines lecture, seminar and studio time to cover media from drawing, painting, video and digital media to printmaking, photography, sculpture and performance art. It runs throughout the Winter quarter from January 6 through March 14, 2014.
I’m excited to be included in MFA Now 2014, an exhibition featuring 17 Bay Area grads. The juror, Donna Napper, curator of the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, selected seventeen works from submitted archive materials to be shown at Root Division for the month of February. The MFA Now 2014 Archive will be published concurrently with a full page dedicated to each contributing artist.
The exhibition will take place during February 5-22, 2014, with opening reception and archive project release happening on Saturday, February 8 at 7-10 P.M. Root Division is at 3175 17th Street at South Van Ness in San Francisco and is open Wednesday through Saturday, 2-6 P.M. or by appointment. Admission is free.
On the installation side of the studio, I’ve created two companion pieces to Projections 2. They are collectively titled Projections 2+3+4.
Three spotlights are aimed directly at three mirrors, projecting beams vertically up the wall to interact with wood, thread, and paper elements to create an array of ‘sculptural drawings’ over the walls and ceiling. Measuring about 12 feet across and 2 feet deep, the installation draws on musical notation, cosmic imagery and the notion that everything in the material world has a narrative.
My newest Long View sketchbook page deals with the theme of marine litter. The accumulation of trash in the Earth’s seas is severe to the extent that it impacts remote Antarctic ecosystems. Learn more about this urgent environmental issue and the efforts to address it on my latest Long View blog post.
Projections 2 is an installation I created for the 2013 Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Awards exhibition currently on view at SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco. The artwork consists of a spotlight directed at a 24″ square horizontal mirror at floor level, casting double shadows of a rotating hoop and swinging orb onto a reflected beam shooting vertically up the wall. Movement is powered by a small electric motor as well as by hand.
My construction addresses humankind’s quest to understand and visualize the universe from both scientific and artistic perspectives. I’m interested, for example, in the artist Joseph Cornell’s celestial boxes whose suspended spheres, shifting rings, and itinerant sand articulate his interpretation of the cosmos. I see his sculptures as analogous to contemporary astrophysicists’ three dimensional maps of galaxies that mark the distribution of matter in space, in that both attempt to comprehend the patterns seen in nature and the laws of physics.
Projections 2 also alludes to our connection with the cosmic sublime. Artists continually strive to re-state the vocabulary of mathematics in a graspable visual form that communicates a sense of awe and wonder. I attempt this here by referencing the physics of light, movement, space, and time by symbolic means. My approach to this work was inspired by Elizabeth Kessler’s course and book titled Picturing the Cosmos which in part addresses how artists translate indexical data into subjective imagery to describe the workings of the cosmos and humanity’s drive to comprehend its breadth and complexity.
Long View Sketchbook Page 059 pictures the constellation Pavo, visible in the southern hemisphere. Pavo represents the Greek myth of Argo, the hundred-eyed giant slain by Hermes and placed in the heavens by Hera as a peacock.
Gazing up at the faraway bird, one might ponder the limitlessness of the cosmos. Astrophysicists certainly have, and their discoveries now question the notion of the universe’s stability in the long run. Read about the ‘finite zipper,’ as I picture it, in the latest post to my Long View blog hosted by the California Academy of Sciences
The jurors were Justin Hoover, the Gallery Director and Curator at SOMArts in San Francisco and Monica Ramirez Montagut, the Associate Director and Senior Curator of MACLA/San Jose Center for Latino Arts.
An exhibition of artwork by Murphy and Cadogan awardees will take place at SOMArts Cultural Center during September 3-28, 2013. The public reception takes place on Friday, Sept 6, 6:30-9:00 P.M. with an awards ceremony at 7 P.M. SOMArts is located at 934 Brannan St. (between 8th & 9th) in San Francisco, CA. Admission is free.
My newest Long View sketchbook entry depicts Hydra, the single largest constellation in the sky. Visible from Antarctica in the austral winter, Hydra stretches across 102.5° to represent the water-serpent from the Greek myth of Heracles’ Twelve Labours. The sewn fabric composition features the constellation’s brightest star, some of its galaxies, and a black hole that spews iron into the cosmos. Read more on my Long View blog.
