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Hey, everybody.
Today, I'm going to share with you my favorite responses
to Lee Boroson's assignment, which is
to create a desktop monument.
He explained it this way.
Go on the internet and find images
of a natural setting, tourist destination, some place
that you've never been to, perhaps
that you'd like to go to, that you know something about
or you know very little about, and use
that as the basis to create your own desktop monument.
So, for me, the key takeaway was
to create a monument based not on what
you think the place looks like, but what it feels like.
And you guys really gave me some feels with us one.
The first is by yes4poe.
And it's fittingly titled "Canyon."
It's paper cut-outs made into a photo collage.
And they say in the description that it's
the Matisse-influenced.
I thought the Matisse reference was right on here.
Not because of the obvious fact that he
did a lot of paper cut-outs, but because he
was a master of color.
And I love the way color is used here.
And I think it's perfectly valid to imagine
one's experience of being at the Grand Canyon as being dominated
by overwhelming color.
Like color is not just a visual sensation.
But can be something that invades and intrudes
upon other senses as well.
Erin Carlson also approach the Grand Canyon as a site,
specifically this photo, and gave their work
the title "Canyon of Influence."
Erin says, "I wanted to see the Grand Canyon for years,
not just for its grand size and dramatic colors,
but because of the geological history revealed in its walls.
I've always been enchanted by the idea
that something as formless as water
could carve away rock and reveal so much history.
I wanted to show that same experience of something
small revealing history as it progressed
in relation to my writing.
My writing not only reveals my history,
but carries with it small pieces of everything
that came before it, like sediment in a river."
With this one, you see how the relative scale is.
There's a sense of monumentality,
even though it's just a stack of books on a desk.
I'm reminded of the photography of James Casebere, who
makes these really intricate table-size models that he then
photographs.
They have this expansive, convincing sense of space,
even though they're just these small reconstructions.
Lyriclorelei took a similar approach to the same subject
based on this image.
And it's a stack of all the notebooks
they used while getting a master's
degree, with the oldest ones at the bottom
and the current and final semesters at the top.
They say, "How this stack has grown
with every semester reminded me of sedimentary layers that
builds up in rocks over time.
I hope that when they do make it to the Grand Canyon,
that I will be overwhelmed with the sense
of the passage of time."
This one has a similar sense of monumentality.
And with both of these, I'm reminded
of the power and presence of books as objects.
Of course, we learn this with Nina Katchadourian's Sorted
Books assignment.
But we see again how books can have such incredible presence,
not just as sculptural objects, but almost as
if they're human subjects when they're being photographed.
They contain multitudes, just like a person in a portrait.
And we had a comment on the assignment video
that resonates strongly with the way this one communicates
the passage of time.
LJM792 studied geology and had the following to say.
"I love that Lee searches for accuracy in his installations
with the same focus with which someone
creating a scientific model might also use.
Their pursuits are fairly similar,
but while a scientist is trying to recreate
the exact physics or the chemistry of a thing,
Lee is trying to recreate its impact, the experience of it,
it's emotional or tactile ambiance if you will.
And tactile ambience is exactly what
drew me to the next response by Tessa,
based on this image of a mangrove forest in Marja,
near Cape Tribulation in Australia.
She used a variety of different kinds of tape
to create this sculpture, with the sticky sides facing out,
imagining this to be the way the swamp land feels.
Tessa claims the overall aesthetic isn't
quite what she had in mind.
But I really respect that she prioritized
the tactility of this sculpture over the visuals.
There's a terrible bias in arts to looks.
And with this response, the visuals
were delightfully incidental.
Another response that I thought captured
a "tactile" and emotional ambiance
was this one by unnestedmatryoshka,
imagining the surface of the Moon.
They said, "When they first landed on the Moon,
they weren't sure how solid the ground would be.
I mean you know it's a solid, but how solid is it?
To me, that's a little like a kid
standing at the edge of a ball pit,
thinking, 'the adults told me I'd
be OK if I stepped into this.
But it looks like it's just going to swallow me whole.'"
There's a really beautiful mystery to these images.
And I appreciate the way the artist has had such attention
to the lighting to give these everyday items a sense
of strangeness and wonder.
The artist also made a fantastic video
where you can hear the crunch of the balls
as the camera navigates the surface.
I remember so vividly what it feels
like to be that kid on the edge of the ball pit.
And I'm immediately transported to that feeling
of excitement/fear.
There's a similar aura of mystery in a response by Kiley
of the Northern Lights based on this image.
Kiley created a tiny little desktop model
and created these images, which have a kind of magical intimacy
that I really enjoy.
It's not nearly as dramatic as the source image.
But for me, that doesn't really matter.
For my own imagination of the Northern Lights,
I guess that there are many times before,
during, and after the wildly photogenic moments that
have a feel closer to what Kiley depicts.
Kiley used candles and flashlights
to create the lighting effects here.
And it reminds me of some of the early precursors to cinema,
like the magic lantern, a 17th century
invention that projected images from painted glass slides.
Early iterations of these were lit by candles or oil
lamps, whose flickering flames caused the image to animate.
We live in an age of an embarrassing abundance
of technology.
But here, I'm reminded of how relatively crude mechanisms can
achieve magical effects.
In this, and in a number of other responses,
the artist has included a kind of reveal shot of the set-up.
And while I'm hesitant to pull back the curtain on this one,
I think knowing the miniature nature of the model
does contribute to the magic.
Returning to another joy of childhood,
I'm reminded of the feeling of peering into a little shoebox
diorama, or playing with a dollhouse,
or marveling at the galleries of miniatures
at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The tiny scale contributes to my sense of wonder
by making me feel kind of contained and safe,
but also opening up to a potentially limitless universe
of imaginative play.
I've saved my favorite one for last.
And this one comes from minnesbeta.
She has created what she calls a little nebula on my desk,
using two mirrors, wool, and glass beads.
She says it turns out a bit too symmetric to be
a bit of chaotic space.
But that it sits more easily on her desk this way.
She also made a video to show how her world was created.
I was immediately reminded 1960s and '70s works
by Robert Smithson, who used mirrors
to create an infinity effect in a similar way.
And I thought Smithson's conception of site and non-site
was particularly relevant here, where the site is what's
out in a natural landscape and the non-site
is bringing that landscape into the space of a gallery.
Or you could think about the mirrored infinity rooms
of Yayoa Kusama, who, since the '60s,
has used similar techniques to create whole worlds
and contained spaces, which viewers are invited
to walk in and be enveloped by.
When trying to imagine or represent
something as vast and unimaginable as the universe,
I appreciate how minnesbeta's response acknowledges
and reflects that endlessness.
What this response and what all of the really good responses
to this assignment do for me is make
me think about what a monument is in the first place.
If you think about some of the most famous, most successful
monuments, like Maya Lin's amazing Vietnam War Memorial,
it's not a direct correlation to what
the war or anyone who participated in it looks like,
but what perhaps it might feel like.
It's a heavy, dark gash in the landscape that
bears the names of the Americans lost in the war
and whose mirrored surface reflects
the image of what's around it and who's looking at it.
I don't see any reason why a representational sculpture
of soldiers would be more effective at calling to mind
or commemorating such a horrific series of events.
I like how Lee Boroson described his artworks as attempts
to turn an effect into a kind of a thing.
In the comments, Paralian says, "His work seems to me
like poetry in sculpture form, portraying whatever subject
more accurately by consciously avoiding direct description.
And that's what this assignment gets at so well,
that there are myriad ways to describe things
beyond the visual.
Of course, that's part of it.
But it's just one part.
And great artists tend to understand that.
Thank you so much for responding to this assignment.
And if you weren't mentioned, that
doesn't mean what you made wasn't great.
We're experimenting with the format
of these highlights videos.
And I'm trying out discussing fewer responses,
but in more depth.
What do you think?
Let's talk about it in the comments.
Oh, and don't forget to keep making desktop monuments.
We'll keep looking out for them and sharing them on our Tumblr.
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