Today I finally figured out what I will do with the Mandelbrot piece. Probably best that I just upload a picture when it’s finished; I’m not in the mood to type a thousand words. Suffice it to say that the piece itself will be fractal by being incorporated in itself, and I intend to use the Droste Effect for the non sculptural parts.
Other pieces that I’ve designed:
There will be a magnifying glass focused on the image of an ant – one of my favorite hobbies as a child (that, and feeding inchworms to ants – Howie giveth and Howie taketh away.) The frame will have this image around it:
If your response is “Who is Ra, the Sun God”, then you’ve won today’s Daily Double (the judges will also accept “What was on the cover of the album Eye in the Sky, an album by The Alan Parson’s Project”).
For the Braille piece (see yesterday’s post), I think I will go a different route. Instead of the E’s frame (which didn’t clean up as easily as I had hoped with H2O2), I think I’ll use etched fingerprints on the frame. I like the idea that the fingerprints would be visible to both the blind (through texture) and the sighted, while the braille under glass will be visible to neither. Fortunately, I’ve already etched my handprint on wood, so I know the effect works well, and I can recycle parts of the image. The E’s frame will be better served around a piece I will make out of a pair of eyeglasses, or perhaps I’ll use some of the optometrist prisms that I have. There a a few things I have planned for them which involve having a distorted image that is corrected by an astigmatic lens.
Another piece will say “What will archeologists think when they find this?” I think I’ll use a dinosaur bone motif for the frame.
I’m hoping to cut most of them tomorrow. I need to get some wood (and acrylic too probably) for the frames, both for the surface and for backing cradles. I’m looking forward to TechShop’s router table being set up so I can finish them properly with insets for glass. I ordered a glass cutter which arrived today so I can cut scrap glass to exact sizes for each frame.
In other news: This evening I went to the First Thursday art openings Downtown. As usual, there wasn’t all that much that excited me – too many geometric images whose only interest was that a human made them instead of a computer. There was the usual spattering of decent paintings, but nothing to write home about. There were also a few that were baffling in their mediocrity, and other than nepotism, I can’t figure out how on earth they made it into a gallery. I find the best pieces are usually the ones in the back offices of galleries. My favorite work was a series of textile water bottles by Lauren DiCioccio at the Jack Fischer Gallery.
