Fotographical Friday – Odd animal week: Bird sculpture with real/fake feathers (by cartoonist Dave Majchrzak)

Stool, paper, stool

“I’ve also been experimenting with found art. I’ve been choosing discarded scrap metal objects, combining them with drawn elements, and then temporarily installing them on a site that relates to their former life. It is interesting to me to challenge the viewer’s perception of an object by reconfiguring it and its orientation by where it’s placed in the physical world we know.”

That is what I said, using “art speak,” in my grad school application. Not much of description though. This piece doesn’t come off too well in the photos either. The paper tween the stools is actually discarded drawings from college students. They were wired together and then trimmed with a jigsaw. On the edges I drew pictographs of chairs.

Floating futon

Like the late Rodney Dangerfield, I’m going back to school. Grad school, that is. I did include some cartoon work in the portfolio I submitted but I also put in some other work that tangentially touches on drawing. And for me, drawing means drawing in a cartoon style.

I’ll be posting some photos of the pieces along with the descriptions I sent, trying to make myself sound smart.

“The piece I created called “Futon Float” incorporates two interdisciplinary aspects. It combines numerous art forms by encompassing drawing, sculpture, installation and photography. In addition, the process of creation was ever changing, with each artistic decision being informed by the previous one. I did not consciously set out with a plan to combine multiple areas that interested me; I discovered a basic idea that appealed to me, then followed my own personal artistic progression to what I felt was a satisfying conclusion.
A futon, the epitome of cheap furniture on which a student would relax, became the perfect object to base the piece I was formulating. I still wanted to take it out of its everyday context by placing it out-of-doors, but since it was actually from the college, I wanted to relate it to its origin. It was then that I came upon the idea of floating it on the campus’s man-made pond.
I did not want this to be an installation of simply a found object – I wanted to add my own personal mark while continuing to pursue the theme of rest and leisure. With no alteration at all, the futon frame was already distorting the idea of relaxation; without a mattress, its metal frame, with thin wire cross-pieces, was uninviting to say the least. I have been primarily a “drawer” in my artistic life and I explored multiple options of how to incorporate that into the piece. I decided to add elements that, in theory, would add comfort to the futon, but in reality would do nothing of the sort. I drew a blanket and two throw pillows on poster board and then cut them out. By affixing them to the real futon I was attempting to play with the context, that only real blankets and pillows would be placed on a futon. I also made them colorful to add the illusion of an inviting place to rest. In addition, I painted parts of the frame in a number of different bright colors to add to its appeal and help it read better when photographed from a distance.
The next step in the piece’s development was the most practical, and would inform its aesthetics – how to make the futon float. The first possibility was to present just the appearance of floating. Unfortunately, the bottom of the pond was too irregular to build up a support structure and, from a photography standpoint, limiting the piece’s possible positions on the pond seemed unwise. From there I considered various low-budget floatation engineering possibilities. Generic Tupperware was deemed too unreliable. Cheap children’s boogie boards were attached to the frame’s legs but, alas, could not keep the futon afloat. Two 4’ x 8’ sheets of insulation foam proved to be the solution.”

What I didn’t say was that one of my students offered to sit on the futon for more photos. I had had this idea in my head before but, unfortunately, the water in the pond doesn’t circulation a lot. What it does have is a herd of geese who live, eat…and do that thing that geese do after they eat, so there were health concerns if she fell in the drink.