plastic fantastic!

This weekend i went to nyc to see some art! After a lot of looking at what was around i decided to spend my time at the brooklyn museum and am very happy i did! the exhibition i was most excited to see was jean-michel othoniel's 50 year retrospective of glass and obsidian extravaganza. The work ranged from his small sulphur and wax sculptures that as the info stated resembled "orifices" to his monumental glass bead installations and fabric peep hole curtains.  Mickalene Thomas had a whole floor of massive paintings encrusted with rhinestones, photos,  a great video piece, and a four room installation. I did not expect to fall so totally in love with her work. the 70's aesthetic never particularly appealed to me and I have no nostalgic associations with it. the Internet images of her work do not do it justice. they are slick, seductive and jarring. and of course i love that they are beyond huge. The first floor also had some great stuff as well as the fourth floor with the dinner party and an unexpected find - a .
My mentor meeting on sunday morning was super helpful. Diana Cooper and I discussed my plastic pieces that I brought with me. The white lights that i brought for the inside of the tube are not the solution to lighting it, a more ambient and diffused white light is what i will be using in the final install. We discussed technical issues with making a 7 foot wooden cube work structurally and executing it in the clean and precise way i envision. so without further ado i am going to start on the frame cube part of the installation. in addition to working on the actual cube i am making a scaled model of the installation in the room to help with planning the space.
I am very happy with the plastic sheeting and will be posting pictures of it soon (my camera battery died mid transfer).

this is the post that never ends, oh no it never ends my friends...

Funny how we always manage to get back to where we started and find it is a compelety different place and wonder if we changed or the place did. Like a favorite childhood spot that seemed immense and transcending but later visited seems tiny and commonplace. In my undergrad senior thesis show i surrounded the installation with a floor to ceiling, thin (almost clear), construction plastic curtain that i hand sewed at the top in a gathering stitch. (for an idea of size the gallery was about 30  by twenty feet and i went around all the walls about a foot in. so that is sewing aprox. 100 feet gathered which is about 200 feet straight).  this membrane had two overlaps where gallery goers could enter and exit, the plastic made a swooshing, floating sound and movement when passed and almost seemed to breathe with the shifting air currents. (for pics of this see www.ndaviau.weebly.com)

detail of plastic layers

plastic sheet two layers about 3 feet by 5 feet

inside plastic bag sculpture

crumpled plastic bag sculpture

on my list of studio things to try this last week was attaching multiple plastic bags together to make a large panel that i could suspend and possibly create a chamber for my mylar something or others (pictures of those below).  I then remembered the plastic sheeting i had left over from six years ago- clearly i never throw anything out. after pinning it to my wall and heat gunning it in two layers i fell in love, and then remembered the membrane (which was not altered except for being gathered). I experimented with sandwiching interfacing (my new favorite material) between the two layers and am interested in the ways it references the interior of a body - bone cells, lung interior, or even mucus-y looking textures that happen when the plastic melts overlaps, tears, and mutates. I also like peeking through the holes and seeing the figure ground reversal of the environment behind it. One of the many benefits of the sheets of plastic as opposed to having to attach together individual bags is that it has no distracting print and there will be no visible seams. skin has no seams (unless you count scars and are frankenstien).  the plastic can be seamlessly 10 feet by 100 feet!

my studio installation. for scale my window is 36 inches wide and 42 inches tall. the top unslanted portion of the ceiling is about 5 feet.

 There is this overwhelming desire i have to wrap myself up in this and dissappear into the spaces. So i did the next best thing and tacked a sheet plastic up in my studio from the ceiling and to three walls then heat gunned it from the inside and outside. the way it responded to heat when it was stretched from  different directions  and not just on a flat wall made it seem alive. it twisted and pulled and of course came untacked from the wall every minute of so resulting in a sculpture that is compelelty different than the one i had originally tacked up. i love the release of control that comes with working with heat and plastic and the suprising outcomes.  this installation was made without the interfacing between the plastic sheet. ( i ran out and will be getting more asap), so it is a little less stiff and and not quite as bone colored, more bright white. i am going to heat gun it again in spots to add more negative space.

small fabric fuse test 6 by 8 inches

larger fabric test about 3 feet by 2 1/2 feet

close up of fabric overlays

On a separate but connected note i have also been fusing fabric together in sheets to create a fabric composite "skin" with multiple layers. i am questioning my "go to" use of white for everything and thinking about the symbolism of white and what jan and fia said at my crit in june about white being a color of suppression and covering up as well as how white is used in ceremonies such as weddings, baptisims, etc. here are some of my fabric fusions. i love touching them and feeling all the different textures. Ben brought up some interesting questions about the interplay between value, culture, tradition, ritual and activity in different types of fabric. i have been reading a lot about lace and thinking about other materials uses connotations, such as muslin, tule, etc.

inside mylar form

fun house mirror mylar bubbles

mylar sculpture about 4 inches across

view inside mylar cave

mylar in a 3d form

flat mylar

the pleasure of melting plastic... (or the least pleasurable way to get cancer)

2 1/2 inches

Ahhh, nothing like a stormy day where you can not open the windows to play with a heat gun and plastic bags... i love the smell of carcinogens in the morning! I especially love the results of this test, they look cellular, membrane-y, and downright skin like. the shrinking action of the plastic isnspired me to pin down parts on a few and see how that affected the melting pattern, it created a "taxidermy pelt" like tension. I then took a ball of wool and wrapped it with a plastic bag and then some interfacing and of course, heat gunned it. the roundness of these compared to the flat wool piece with the interfacing made on an embroidery hoop is much more pleasing to me. i love the little spaces and gaps. Not quite sure where this is leading but i am enjoying the results so far.

...

7" long x 3" tall

detail

detail of end

this is bigger, about 16" from top to bottom

I have been playing around with cheesecloth, wool and ways to stiffen fabric. After many different tests (mod podge, rabbit skin glue, wheat paste, gloss and matte medium, bees wax, all sorts of glue) that resulted in a toxic stench in my studio it occurred to me that i could use the heat bonding fabric interfacing applied over the circular wool embroidery hoop piece. I disassembled the previous wool and gauze piece and reassembled it with the interfacing. When heat gunned -voila! - exactly what i wanted! the gauze stiffened/ As a bonus surprise it also shrunk got a funny texture in some places, which i like it because of the texture and spontaneity it adds to the pieces. after setting the entire thing and applying multiple layers in some places and tearing in other places. i enjoyed unraveling the structure  of the gauze, which look like cilia. conversely, i also like the grid that is formed by the threads of the intact fabric.   as i hung them up they reminded me of my tumor series. not sure where they are going and how much i like that. i am going to make some more also some larger ones and see where they take me, and experimenting with the amount of stuffing they have.
For my next paper i have started looking deeper into fabric art and soft sculpture, as i have finally realized that i can not keep fiber and fabric out of  my work no matter how hard i try. I have been looking at the work of Annette Messager, christopher langton, ernesto neto, tim hawkinson and many, many, (many) others. I also have sketched some plans for a larger chamber that i might make. and ooh yes i am still cutting circles whenever i need a nice break from life! i just started the green color series. only blue and violet left!

the last two weeks...

My sneaky photo in Fireflies at the whitney.

After seeing the amazing Kusama explosion all over nyc and meeting with my mentor i was thinking about the possibilities for two dimensional art. These are just some experimental relaxing sketchy paintings. I have not done any painting (with the exception of my tumors) since (gulp) my foundation classes in undergrad, 7 years ago. i was surprised by how relaxing and gratifying it was to just play around with materials and no pressure or final product in mind. Making these paintings helped clarify some of the things that have been interesting me lately- specifically boundaries, and conversely the breaking of boundaries. I read a good book (not for school) titled "where to draw the line"about the importance of healthy boundaries and it got me thinking to the boundaries all around us, state and country lines, cell walls, the atmosphere, skin, acceptable ways of acting around different people, etc. and what happens when these boundaries are broken. I like graph paper and felt most comfortable starting my paintings on 11" x 17" graph paper so that is what these are on. I started painting these the day after i saw kusamas show and putsed around with them for about a week as kind of a relaxing evening ritual. The influence of Kusama's show is definitely visible in many of these.

detail

for some reason this came out much more blue than in real life.

detail

detail

broken square

i realize this looks like a president or something. unintended.

this is smaller than the reset at 7x9 inches

diagonal broken square (the paper is white with blue grid, bad photo color.

cheesecloth covered wool with leak about 4 inches wide and 12 inches long.

i like the way the cheesecloth can be morphed and looks graph like but skin like as well. 

my landscape oil painting, dated 1992 (made under my dad lessons when i was 7). Now under the white grid painting, bye bye bob ross!

close up of white grid encaustic painting

studio view

white grid painting with slice, i am working on material and things that are going to be spilling out of it onto the floor.

close up 

8" diameter embroidery hoop with screening, interfacing, and wool

a felt test with the interfacing materials and yucky felt colors

a little wool leak

these are just some forms i have been playing with

this is wax poured over an ice sphere, I made this my first semester but have been coming back to the idea of preserving something in flux.