Amoebas
Amoebas, 1993-94
“Squares”, “Targets” and “Rubber Band Rothko” Variable dimensions Site-specific and can be recreated. To learn more about The Big Giveaway of these works, click here. As part of my new approach to my work, I started to rethink the act of drawing and mark-making as it relates to drawing. In particular, I began to distance “the hand” from the act of art making by placing the hand farther away from the finished object. When I combined rubber bands with rubber cement, I found a source of inspiration. Shooting rubber bands was a childhood play activity. We shot them from our fingers and from crude, hand-carved wooden “guns” augmented with a wooden/wire clothespin. My brothers and I mostly shot them at each other, but also competed at shooting houseflies. Dipping a rubber band in rubber cement, I shot them at various surfaces – onto paper and then onto the wall. I then painted rubber cement on the wall and shot untreated rubber bands onto those areas. Any rubber bands that missed simply fell to the floor. Upon impact the rubber bands collapsed into not-quite-predictable random shapes. Being a circle, the single rubber band would fold back into itself, but not take on an angular or straight-line shape. The results had a satisfyingly organic feel. On closer inspection, the individual rubber band resembles a single-cell organism as seen through a simple low-power microscope. The act of shooting the rubber band introduced a seemingly uncontrolled randomness to the final outcome, but the demarcation of the target zone, the lonely area truly receptive, provided an element of formal control. |
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