"Echoes of Remnants" 24" x 30" Oil/P/P 2021
Reference Materials - “Echos of Remnants” 24” x 30” Oil/Paper/Panel 2020/21
**This piece centers around one aspect of dreaming, the feeling/s we have as we traverse a dream’s narrative. These feelings can be very strong. They have a certain flavor, and at least in my experience, seem to fade when I awake in the morning. They are so much of what gave the dream it’s meaning, that without them, the events of the dream can seem like a bullet point report of what happened.
A while back, I had a dream about a friend of mine who died three and a half years ago. Meeting friends who have died in a dream isn’t necessarily unusual for me, given that I’ll soon be seventy-one. Over the past three and a half years, I’ve lost five friends, some who I’d known for fifty plus years. When I meet a deceased friend in a dream, it almost always is in a time related period of the past, when we doing something together. It seems very normal.
The dream I had about my friend Diane, who I knew for twenty-one years, was different. To begin with, the time I was experiencing in the dream was the present moment, today. I was in San Francisco walking down a wide down town street. I was about thirty-five feet from the intersection. The light was green, and people were walking perpendicular through the crossing. All of a sudden, I see Diane walking across, talking with a person beside her. I immediately was in shock. I knew she had died over three years ago, but there she was, walking casually through the intersection. Diane had a continually worsening disability, making her unable to walk in the two years before she passed, but here she was strolling along. I called out to her, but she didn’t hear me. I began running, but I somehow lost her in the crowd. When I got back to Berkeley, I told a number of people what had happened. They looked at me quizzically not knowing what to say. The accompanying feeling during my dream, was what really made this resurrection experience impactful, but I had lost that feeling by morning.
The image references for this new painting were mostly from stock photography, which I modified. However, the image below is a piece made by an art school friend of mine, Richard Harrington. He talks about what he does below. Somehow, the description of his work, struck me as relational to what I was exploring.
51/2 inches top point to bottom point
Hi John,
I want to let you know a little bit about this object and how it might be thought about, displayed, or experimented with.
The material is hardware cloth, i.e. zinc coated steel. The zinc coating is resistant to oxidation but will eventually become uniformly gray. In the ‘art’ domain it is usually used as the substrate for something rigidly moldable … covered with plaster and then made into something. You’ll also recognize it as the material used to keep deer or rabbits off the carrots.
For me, the uniform grid, ductile yet rigid property, uniform grayness, and tendency to generate moiré patterns have always been attractive.
Who needs to cover over this interesting stuff?
In the art object world, I suppose this would be regarded as a type of minimal sculpture. There is one part of me that has that in mind all the time. But there is also a kinetic dimension created because, as you’ll see, the slightest movement of a viewer’s eyes or movement of the object itself create a moiré flickering that is characteristic of kinetic artwork. I’m especially interested in the ‘skeletal’ dimension of perception, alternately looking at, or through, the objects that I’ve been building.
In the mathematical world this object is called a (star-like) stellation of a dodecahedron. The seed geometry of this object is a dodecahedron i.e., a Platonic Solid consisting of twenty equilateral pentagonal faces. Each of the twenty faces of the dodecahedron are made from five four-sided pyramids (tetrahedra.) Though the dodecahedron is an ancient form it’s usage was most recently revisited by Buckminster Fuller and others.
I’m intrigued by the ‘valencies’ that appear depending on the scale or material that the objects that I make. Some smaller ones than yours are made of aluminum screen and have a jewel-like property that some have characterized as ‘featherlike gravitas. Because of the scale and density of yours I think it has a property that is quite a bit like a medieval weapon of some kind. Some of the objects are significantly larger… About 1.5 m in diameter, and they are like wire balloons… seemingly fragile, but in fact quite rigid because of the techniques that I use to assemble them. When I exhibited some of them at the Cambridge Science Festival in April, one nerd immediately characterized them as antiballoons.
Finally, for now, but most importantly, I have to point out the significance of the ‘ecology’ of how these experiments are exhibited. Ideally they ought to be seen in a condition of focused light. Direct sunlight, tensor light, light from a projector of some kind…digital or old fashioned slide projector, or focused theater light. The objects were originally conceived to be seen with the cast shadow that they create… a circumstance where the cast shadow―penumbration is so similar to the object that it’s hard to say which is more important… the object, or its shadow. This circumstance is straight out of camouflage theory. My other installations have always included circumstances of unique light conditions. You’ll see…have fun with yours.
**This piece centers around one aspect of dreaming, the feeling/s we have as we traverse a dream’s narrative. These feelings can be very strong. They have a certain flavor, and at least in my experience, seem to fade when I awake in the morning. They are so much of what gave the dream it’s meaning, that without them, the events of the dream can seem like a bullet point report of what happened.
A while back, I had a dream about a friend of mine who died three and a half years ago. Meeting friends who have died in a dream isn’t necessarily unusual for me, given that I’ll soon be seventy-one. Over the past three and a half years, I’ve lost five friends, some who I’d known for fifty plus years. When I meet a deceased friend in a dream, it almost always is in a time related period of the past, when we doing something together. It seems very normal.
The dream I had about my friend Diane, who I knew for twenty-one years, was different. To begin with, the time I was experiencing in the dream was the present moment, today. I was in San Francisco walking down a wide down town street. I was about thirty-five feet from the intersection. The light was green, and people were walking perpendicular through the crossing. All of a sudden, I see Diane walking across, talking with a person beside her. I immediately was in shock. I knew she had died over three years ago, but there she was, walking casually through the intersection. Diane had a continually worsening disability, making her unable to walk in the two years before she passed, but here she was strolling along. I called out to her, but she didn’t hear me. I began running, but I somehow lost her in the crowd. When I got back to Berkeley, I told a number of people what had happened. They looked at me quizzically not knowing what to say. The accompanying feeling during my dream, was what really made this resurrection experience impactful, but I had lost that feeling by morning.
The image references for this new painting were mostly from stock photography, which I modified. However, the image below is a piece made by an art school friend of mine, Richard Harrington. He talks about what he does below. Somehow, the description of his work, struck me as relational to what I was exploring.
51/2 inches top point to bottom point
Hi John,
I want to let you know a little bit about this object and how it might be thought about, displayed, or experimented with.
The material is hardware cloth, i.e. zinc coated steel. The zinc coating is resistant to oxidation but will eventually become uniformly gray. In the ‘art’ domain it is usually used as the substrate for something rigidly moldable … covered with plaster and then made into something. You’ll also recognize it as the material used to keep deer or rabbits off the carrots.
For me, the uniform grid, ductile yet rigid property, uniform grayness, and tendency to generate moiré patterns have always been attractive.
Who needs to cover over this interesting stuff?
In the art object world, I suppose this would be regarded as a type of minimal sculpture. There is one part of me that has that in mind all the time. But there is also a kinetic dimension created because, as you’ll see, the slightest movement of a viewer’s eyes or movement of the object itself create a moiré flickering that is characteristic of kinetic artwork. I’m especially interested in the ‘skeletal’ dimension of perception, alternately looking at, or through, the objects that I’ve been building.
In the mathematical world this object is called a (star-like) stellation of a dodecahedron. The seed geometry of this object is a dodecahedron i.e., a Platonic Solid consisting of twenty equilateral pentagonal faces. Each of the twenty faces of the dodecahedron are made from five four-sided pyramids (tetrahedra.) Though the dodecahedron is an ancient form it’s usage was most recently revisited by Buckminster Fuller and others.
I’m intrigued by the ‘valencies’ that appear depending on the scale or material that the objects that I make. Some smaller ones than yours are made of aluminum screen and have a jewel-like property that some have characterized as ‘featherlike gravitas. Because of the scale and density of yours I think it has a property that is quite a bit like a medieval weapon of some kind. Some of the objects are significantly larger… About 1.5 m in diameter, and they are like wire balloons… seemingly fragile, but in fact quite rigid because of the techniques that I use to assemble them. When I exhibited some of them at the Cambridge Science Festival in April, one nerd immediately characterized them as antiballoons.
Finally, for now, but most importantly, I have to point out the significance of the ‘ecology’ of how these experiments are exhibited. Ideally they ought to be seen in a condition of focused light. Direct sunlight, tensor light, light from a projector of some kind…digital or old fashioned slide projector, or focused theater light. The objects were originally conceived to be seen with the cast shadow that they create… a circumstance where the cast shadow―penumbration is so similar to the object that it’s hard to say which is more important… the object, or its shadow. This circumstance is straight out of camouflage theory. My other installations have always included circumstances of unique light conditions. You’ll see…have fun with yours.