Melting - pt. 2

Melting Keyboard

Melting

Over the past few months I’ve been working on a series of Melting objects. The project has a simple inspiration – my fear of things falling apart, and my somewhat curious desire to see things fall apart. I think that desire comes out of the same interest in films about conflict and death; one wants to look upon their fears from a safe distance. I can’t help but smile when I see these everyday things losing their shape, their surfaces dripping like candle wax, while they spread out into a homogenous puddle. Yet I know I’m scared of this happening to me and my world; there is the constant awareness in the back of my mind that everything is more fragile than I’d like it to be. Every day I work towards building a better and larger life, and there’s still just as much chance that it will fall apart. So I play with everyday things, always on a small scale, and always in my control.

‘Melting’ continues to be an interesting organic process of falling apart to impose on these rather static objects. It always seems to produce unexpected results; often disgusting and bodily. It is entropic and irreversible, horrifying and yet beautiful.

I’ve been melting calculators, staplers, tape dispensers, and the tape cassette player at the top of this post. I’m somewhat non-committal in terms of the end product. I have remnants of this process that I plan to display as sculptures, but I also have photographs of the events in-process that I intend to display as well. There are aspects of both that I really love.

I’ll be posting more photographs of my Melting series in the coming weeks.

-Steve

Restart

After 14 months of quiet meditation, I’ve decided it’s time to restart my blog. Candidly, I was pursuing it too formally; it’s time to loosen up and let myself enjoy it a little more. Plus, I find myself with both the time to write and the wish to share my thoughts. In the coming days you’ll see a flurry of posts about recent events, art pieces in progress, and stuff I’m into (books, movies, etc.).

Fall is suddenly here. Well, it’s not official quite yet – still summer for another week, but it’s getting cold enough that I’m ready to call it fall.

So what am I up to? I’ve been in my studio, getting a lot done on my Melting series (I hope to post more about that later). It rained all weekend, so Sarah and I spent the Saturday and Sunday holed up in our apartment, watching movies and TV. I also managed to finish Call of Duty 4 (COD4) on my PS3 and spend a little time ravaging the streets in Grand Theft Auto IV (GTAIV) with my friend Craig. In an effort to prepare for the cooler weather while maintaining my suave style, I did some online shopping as well.

Sarah and I did go to a couple of cool places this weekend. For one, we went to Union Pizza up in Evanston , where we met Sarah’s coworkers. Union Pizza is a hip pizza joint, walls stripped bare (literally to concrete and the builders’ spray paint markers) and décor laden with modern furniture. I do believe the pizza was wood-fired. Sarah ordered the Lamb Sausage pizza. I still feel guilty about that. It was really good, but I don’t eat that much meat. I don’t know when I last ate lamb before that. All in all, I recommend the place, but you pay for the designer setting. But you expected that.

We also went to Vega Estates, named for the landlords of my friends Julie and Roxane, who host monthly exhibitions in their apartment’s basement and garage. This recent show is called Tomorrow. The show itself was fine, but sparsely attended in the pouring rain. It featured an architectural video by Marco Kane, composed mostly of still shots inside buildings, a few slow pans, overlaid with trance-like music. The video had an eerie, thoughtful quality that I liked, but as a whole it felt too much like other videos I’d seen before. I can’t tell you who exactly made these other two pieces (as I wasn’t planning to write a review), but I appreciated a pair of diamond shaped paintings – framed with what appeared to be old, very ornate recycled frames. The paintings themselves were half abstract, textured paintings – almost flesh-like, and half bare wood panel. The paintings seemed to be about these contrasts, and had a fetishistic quality to them. In addition there was a pair of photographs, or should I say one photograph duplicated? The image was of a small waterfall, hidden in some tropical forest; it was printed in black and white, duplicated as both the positive and negative version of itself. The point where the water hit the ground was almost figural, but what I liked about this piece was the analytical look at a scrap of paradise. It seemed to long for and question longing for the clandestine locale.

After a rainy Sunday marathon of movies and TV shows, Sarah and I went for a casual walk around our neighborhood. We stopped at the 7 Eleven on Devon , but didn’t end up buying anything because they require a $10 minimum to use a credit card. Having recently learned that it’s against credit card policy to require a minimum for credit card payment, we reported the merchant to MasterCard. Now I understand that it’s inconsiderate to spend fifty cents using your credit card, but ten bucks is a high minimum, and the guy behind the counter was pretty rude to Sarah about it. Hopefully next time we stop by, they will have learned their lesson.

That’s it for today. Tomorrow I hope to post more.

-Steve