Spatial Practices

1. Self-Directed Practice #1: Research 

 2. Self-Directed Practice #1: Final  

3. Self-Directed Practice #2: Research  

4. Self-Directed Practice #2: Final  

Thinking on Gaston Bachelard's, the Poetics of Space, specifically the section on doors, I was struck with the idea of inside and out as a space of claustrophobia and agoraphobia. Specifically, my intent was to create a space that encompassed the negative rather than the positive space, creating a claustrophobic space, one where you are tunneled inside rather than allowing you to navigate around the sculptural installation.

 1. Corners: QCQ 

2. Corners: Research 

1.  2.  3. 

3. Corners: Final 

4. The Dialects of Outside and Inside: QCQ 

5. Door - The Dialects of Outside and Inside: Research 

Recently I have been exploring the tactile properties of silicone caulking as a medium for artmaking. I specifically am attracted to its sense of fluidity and durability. Personally it has connection to an urban sensibility as well as a modern one. I am looking to explore further as both a 2-d and 3-d material.

Even figuratively, nothing that concerns intimacy can be shut in, nor is it possible to fit into one another, for purposes of designating depth, impressions that continue to surge up.

I was thinking of interior doors as a moment of introspection looking interiorly as opposed to exterior video eye monitor. We are always looking outside our doors to view an exterior (possibly threat). I wanted to position the viewer to look inside. 

DOORS: Dialectic of inside and outside

‘Even figuratively, nothing that concerns intimacy can be shut in, nor is it possible to fit into one another, for purposes of designating depth, impressions that continue to surge up.’

Q: We must be free as regards all definitive intuitions-and geometrism records definitive intuitions

C: The idea that physical space limits our internal space, is a very interesting, if diametrically opposed idea. Can we as artists challenge the idea of what constitutes physical space and how we understand its limitations. Can a door mean more than just a separation of space? Where does inside and outside begin and end? I think this is a great problem to work towards unravelling. Many artists have already approached the concepts of what defines spaces. I recall a movie that, although absurd in its premise (it was a comedy), the inhabitants of a hippie commune did away with all the doors so that space flowed from one room to another unobstructed. The private became shared and division were done away with. Or artists who record interior space as memory by recreating the internal space as outer.

Q: How can we reimagine the space between here and there? Doors are so metaphorically charged the questions. Do they have a central point where one can find a center? I have no easy answer for this conundrum.

Incorporating several ideas from the reading of corner, I combined my idea boards. Ideas of memory (a vast museum of things collected) and the space between being and non-being (an embalmed state), I constructed a wake for the myself (or rather a past self). “Yet even in this prison, there is peace. In these angles and corners, the dreamer would appear to enjoy the repose that divides being and non-being. He is the being of an unreality. Only an event can cast him out.”  “Vast museum of insignificant things. It is impossible to dream of an old house that is not the refuge of old things-it’s own- or that has been filled with old things as a result of the simple craze of a collector of knick-knacks.” Both quotes evoked a response to corners of ‘I am’ to ‘what I was’.

Q: “Yet in such daydreams as these the past is very old indeed. For they reach into the great domain of the undated past. By allowing the imagination to wander through the crypts of memory, without realizing it, we recapture the bemused life of the tiniest burrows in the house, in the almost animal shelter of dreams.”

C: I can’t help but resonate with the idea of memories as daydreams, allusively weaving itself into something new through the act of imagination. The idea of wandering through crypts (and the allusion of death and decay and past and possibly forgotten) as we wander old memories which can no longer be revived like a corpse but embalmed , thus ‘recapturing’ the tiniest fragment of a memory of what was.

Corners as a metaphor, a space in the mind in which to ‘become’, to emerge from, a space of departure, is a great metaphor for orientation. The idea of emerging and projecting out into the open space of the unknown, leaving behind a discarded line of memories, a flotsam and jetsom of previous being. The things collected along the way, reminders of being, housed within the shelter of our neurons. Like a tree, branching from a source as it stretches in undulating chaos toward a source of light.

I like the idea of reimagining a past. A new beginning of a projected self-view. The corner as a safe refuge, “an almost animal shelter of dreams”, where one can reimagine the ‘bemused life’ of the past as a paragon self. Corners, the once domain of the infantilized self, becomes a catapult from whence we are to where we become.

Q: ‘Corners’, the alpha from whence we project ourselves unto cogito, where we think therefore I am, how do we conceptualize a beginning to project oneself from? Do we need think in terms of corners (although an apt metaphor)? From where is our starting point of being, ‘I am’, and how do we use that find our steps, creatively? The labyrinth of memory, how do we navigate, to find our way forward to an ‘exit’ of clarity and purpose? I have no answer, but looking back (should we?) sometimes obscures as much as brings any sense of clarity.

“The dreamer in his corner wrote off the world in a detailed daydream that destroyed, one by one, all the objects in the world.”

“Vast museum of insignificant things. It is impossible to dream of an old house that is not the refuge of old things-it’s own- or that has been filled with old things as a result of the simple craze of a collector of knick-knacks.”

My idea stems from this quote of corners. I grew up with family that collects knick knacks. Not quite on the level of hoarders but nonetheless just as enthusiastic. The idea of collecting memories so as not to forget, to remember, something that can’t be held unto. Clutters of memory with no defragmentation.

“Yet even in this prison, there is peace. In these angles and corners, the dreamer would appear to enjoy the repose that divides being and non-being. He is the being of an unreality. Only an event can cast him out.”

The thinking behind this idea deals with embalming (as memory, an idea, a person). This idea hails from my looking into embalming practices popularized in Puerto Rico with preserving the person in a state in between ‘reality and non-reality’. Preserving a memory of, a state of, something gone but preserved in rituals and place.

Heidi Bucher, 1997-78, liquid latex and tuile

“This primitive mummifying effect, or attempting to retain bygone loved ones, is as old as the world itself, but in the case of a Bucher’s treatment of the house as a human (dead) body, the out-of-reach aspect creates a particularly compelling physical narrative.” 

1. Self-Directed Presentation: Research

2. QCQ #5: Concrete Blonde

3. Negative Fragments: Clay Impressions I (Final)

4. Negative Fragments: Clay Impressions II (Final)

1. 2. 3. 

5. Positive Fragments: Cast I (Final)

As part of my project for casting off Clay impressions, I originally chose silicone but then changed to paper. The paper process was a stark contrast to the original metal grate and concrete from which I made the mold. The idea of something so flimsy and thin as a lid for a sewage line seemed ridiculous and incredible. The clay mold itself became part of the work as some sort of shattered remnant, an archeological refuse, salvaged as a memory.

I originally wanted to cast with silicone but rather than make an impression I decided to let the material make the form. I assembled various castings to create phantasmagoric shapes reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft’s beloved ‘Cthulu’ mythos.