if you’re interested (and if you’re reading this page, you probably are for one reason or another) catie is slowly explaining her thesis project on her blog. very interesting stuff dealing with how a site should determine the architecture rather than the architecture imposing itself on the site. and there are pretty pictures and drawings.
in case you were wondering, this is how you begin to think of objects that you are making after you have lived with them for several weeks and you are sanding them at 3 am.
once upon a time, there lived a 7. 7 was a fairly content number, but had become bored, and also annoyed at the other numbers (7 harbored a particular grudge against 9, which, as you may know, recently came to a very ugly and violent close, a fact which traumatized 6 to no end. this story is just the sort of thing that gets too oft-repeated in today’s scandal loving media, but that is neither here nor there. we are presently concerned with kinder, gentler days of 7.) one ordinary day 7 was walking alone when a sine wave came along, oscillating gently. 7 had never seen anything so beautiful. they immediately stuck up a stimulating conversation. as they talked, 7 became more and more fascinated by the sine wave’s movements, and eventually asked to be shown how to move like that. as sine explained, they slowly began to dance. 7 began to notice that the angle (which 7 had always secretly thought of as rather awkward and pointy, and something that 3 and 6, and especially 9—we know how that worked out—never failed to mention) could flex and sway in a manner that could only be described as seductive. as the two danced, they talked (this was a much simpler time, when dancing was very thought provoking) about how their forms might appear as if they were flowing through an extra dimension. as 7 thought these thoughts, more 7s began to spring fully formed from 7s philosophizing head, each at a slightly different angle and length of extension. these 7s began to group themselves together into pleasing patterns. much to everyone’s delight, the more groups appeared, the more ways they could combine and rearrange and dance together. everyone smiled, and danced and flowed through their newfound dimensions. 7 never knew happier days.
i’m still not sure what exactly i think about the show on saturday night. i was very happy with my pieces, but i feel like i didn’t present them as well as i could have. i felt like people weren’t quite sure how to take pieces of furniture in an art gallery. at first, no one was really interacting with the stuff. no one was sitting or touching them (which, granted, is what we are taught) so i made my friends go over and sit on them, and from then on it seemed as if people began to use them slightly more. but then i wasn’t sure if people began to see them as just ‘gallery furniture’, something to sit on while you looked at the real art. it’s just hard to put so much of yourself into something, then put it in front of complete strangers, and not get quite the reaction that you were hoping for. anyway, here’s some pictures from the show. i’ll be updating my portfolio site with the new products soon.
i’m trying to think of a good analogy to how i’m currently feeling. i think that what comes closest is having a three week long orgasm. my mind and body are tired, weak, spent. about 25% of my brain is still cranking. it’s saying ‘come on, let’s go. on to the next thing. keep moving, jackass.’, but boy does it get shot down quickly by the other 75% that seems to bounce from one thing to another without ever really stopping except to just stare out into space. several times this past week, i worked for over 20 hours at a stretch. i easily put in 100 hours for the week. probably slightly less for the previous two. and this was not design work, sitting at a desk, pushing a pencil. my hands tell the story of how sharp formica is when broken, how a staple gun is in no way concerned with the effect it’s having on the inside of your thumb, how at some point, your fingers just won’t hold things quite as well as they did before you tightened all those clamps and sanded all of those pieces. unless you have been a part of some sort of art or design project, i don’t know if you can understand the emptiness that accompanies a project’s finish. it’s not just the work, the hours, but a part of you is consumed by these very pieces that you are making. you are not just crunching numbers and presenting your work. no, everything has come from your head. you designed it from top to bottom. if it sucks, you suck. if it looks bad, you look bad. but if they love it, they love you. this is why artists go crazy. you just never know. but you just keep doing it. riding the roller coaster of loving and hating until hopefully at some point you can look back and see that it might in fact have been fun and if you were to be truthful with yourself, that you had never felt more alive than when you were creating, sweating, bleeding beautiful objects that were no one’s but your own.
after a day of sitting in my apartment finalizing designs (and my day is no where near done), i thought that i would cheer myself up and post a drawing that is truly on my wall. when i first moved into my apartment i had recently seen several audrey hepburn films and i decided that she would be my first apartment muse. the image is the iconic one printed by fred astaire’s character in ‘funny face’. it’s done in graphite and it makes me smile every time i see it. it’s a good reminder that not everything that i attempt comes out like shit.
jeff and i have begun collaborating on several pieces that are going to be at an event (more coming later on the specifics) on march 6th. we have come up with a pretty fantastic (in our opinion) design solution. i feel that it’s very postmodern (which treads a very thin line between love and hate for me), and yet it’s just very cool. but for me, the beauty is in the simplicity. we need 8 pieces by march 6th. talk about a short deadline. and i feel that if we had more time, we probably would bitch it up, so in this case simplicity is key. and nothing could be easier or cooler than what i present to you…
or is that just the glue?
tonight i glued up the second half of my 7 sine stool. after having it clamped up for about three hours, i just couldn’t wait to see what it would look like. so i felt fairly confident that if i took the clamps off, the whole thing wouldn’t just fall apart (in case you were wondering, the directions for wood glue state that you only have to keep a piece clamped for 30 minutes, but the glue will set fully overnight, which we’ll assume they mean at least 12 hours), which it didn’t. everything worked out great and i am very happy about how it turned out. the two keys in the top and the one near the floor held it together very well (also ICYWW, the two halves of the stool are separate pieces in order to allow for maximum reconfiguration and are held together by the square ‘keys’). so here are some pics of the piece. you can probably guess which half has been sanded down and which just got glued up.
and with a little help from some tape on the floor, we can use some photoshop to see what this thing is going to look like in bench form and face to face.
god, that’s so fucking hot. i’m still completely amazed when anything that i try to do comes out anywhere remotely close to where i wanted it to.
the second installment of on the wall. this one looks like rain maybe. just playing with repetition of form with variable scale.
in the image, i have also included my uber fancy drawing setup. i am not actually drawing on the wall. i have two sheets of bristol drawing paper pinned to the wall and a roll of trash (what we called it in architecture, basically tracing paper) hung above it. this way i can just rip a drawing off and roll down some more. this is seriously the only way i have found to be okay with drawing just for the sake of drawing. i know that the trash is like $5 for a roll of 2000 feet or something like that. an actual sheet of nice virgin paper intimidates the hell out of me. that’s why i can’t paint. the canvases are just to pretty to ruin.
tonight i glued up and clamped one half of one of my 7 sine
stools. hopefully this iteration will be the winner. this version has two keys (you’ll se later) on the seat that should keep it tight together.
after it got all clamped up, i decided to do some fancy shmancy artsy photos since i haven’t done that in a while.
i’m going to be in an art show at the end of february at a new gallery that arch dc is opening up in anacostia. they have been kind enough to just give me an 8′ x 10′ chunk of the gallery to do with whatever i would like. for several years now i have been fascinated by art made with string. the idea of using a one dimensional object to create a 3 dimensional object is just exactly my cup of tea. (if any of you remember the front hallway at ccf when i was an intern you’ll have an idea of what i’m talking about). so i want to make a wall out of string in the gallery and i’ve been working on what that may look like.
so the idea of these is that if you have two curves drawn on two surfaces, you can connect corresponding points with the string and form (well, more like imply. i’m not making an actual surface) a fairly complex 3 dimensional surface. in this one, the two curves are reflections of the other, meaning that all of the strings pass through a common line in the middle of the surface. i wasn’t very happy with this model. the curve is too sharp and i don’t like how they flatten out in the middle. so…
so in this one i softened the curve and instead of mirroring one curve to another, they are kind of different combinations of the same parts. all that matters is that i like it much better. the surface is much easier to read and the side view is much more interesting. i doubt that this will be the last version of this, but i like where it is.
i did a larger version of the drawing of brandon and i must say that i like it about 1000 times more. it reads so much easier. there’s not quite as much going on in the different heights of the blocks, but the idea is still there enough to break up the image. i’m excited to see some of my different drawings and some different types of wood.