After coming to BG I began to realize how much of a powerhouse the art program at BG is. I learned more and more about the staff who were very professional and well known nationally. Most noticeably, Dennis Wojtkiewicz, who is an oil painter is a huge inspiration to me. His use of thin glazes and vibrant colors while being a perfectionist and hyperrealist is something that I want to strive for in my own career. His art is contemporary and his pieces have a meditative quality and his killer amount of detail draws me in every time I see his work. In my work, I wanted to capture his sense of movement his paintings allude to but I wanted my sculpture to be interactive for my viewers to capture them the same way he captures my attention.

His work is truly inspiring and I hope to one day paint on a similar level of mastery.

For this part of the process we focused on two of our 5 designs that we liked the most out of step 6.

From there we created two very small scale mock-ups out of cardboard to get an idea of our larger mock-ups. I came to a conclusion very on in my mock-ups that I wanted to make my sculpture interactive so I began thinking about ways the viewer could come up to my sculpture and play with it. Right away I had an idea that one of my designs that used pedal like shapes would be more interactive than my other sculpture which would have been more fragile.

So, I decided that after my mock-ups I was going to do the design that interested me more and would be more interactive to my viewers.

This part of the project forced us to pick a material and alter it in any way, shape, form, or texture that provoked us and made the material unrecognizable. I personally chose soda cans as my material and used a single can for my exploration. I cut it in several different ways, clipped the edges to make a wave form, stippled it with a needle, made an assortment of different materials, and I even took 2 cans outside and hammered them on different hard materials to try to create weird textures.

I found that cutting the cans into shapes and texturing them would work best for the design that I picked.

objects have a language to them, thinking about how they were made and formed

-clay is organic

-clay is man made

-gold is precious, associated with moms, jewelry, fine taste

-metal- rigid, cold, hard architectural

abstraction- zooming into a point where it cent be identified

trouve- art made of objects that usually dont make art

ontology- philosophical study of existence.

object oriented ontology- put things at center of study

ready made- art made from manufactured materials- was useless trash but became meaningful with a new meaning

This part of the process combined steps 2, creating abstract shapes from our objects, and combining step 4, the markings, together to make 2d drawings that could be turned into a sculpture. During this process I had trouble creating completely different designs but in the end I had an interesting collection. This step pushed me outside of my comfort zone to make something creative. I thought it was interesting that our marks and abstract shapes could be related to create a singular sculpture.

This step of the process was very interesting because it made my objects become completely abstract. The two objects I decided to abstract and make marks out of were a chap stick and a stapler. For my marks I primarily covered these two objects in ink and played around with the shapes they made. I also used the objects to try and make imprints on paper plates and I made an imprint in the soft chap stick inside the tube.

There isn’t a clear and cut definition of what sculpture is. Sculpture is generally a 3D object that occupies a space and gives symbolic meaning to what everyday objects do in their respective space.

Scale plays a huge role in what an object means.

The contrast between two scales is what determines a sculpture as “large or tiny”.

The word “sculpture” is a blanket term that gets applied to assortments of objects that occupy a space in the 3 dimension.

A sculptures form is determined by the function it serves and the tension it creates in space.

When using my partners descriptions I started by underlining parts of her paper that I thought were interesting. I then decided that after reading her paper I would create a circular “flower like” sculpture. In her paper she described her objects as “thin” and “had a smaller hole on a larger circle”. These two descriptions helped me create a sculpture that is pinned to the wall and climes out to the viewers eye. It ended up being a very appealing piece to look at.

This part of the process was pretty interesting because it was fun to attempt to describe my objects without giving away what the object was. I was forced to dive deep into the object and create creative descriptions that could have had several different conclusions.