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I have this thing that I do. It's like a notion of public and private spaces.
Like this building, it has an outside presence and when all the doors are closed,
you have one experience, but then when you start opening there's a whole
interior thing. I like the process of discovering that. There's like
a whole other world happening on the inside.
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A lot of people think that I make miniatures. I don't really see them as
miniatures. I see him more as like an intimate scale, away of like connecting
with someone on a more immediate and more focused way.
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With the really small pieces, I think it goes right into your senses, faster.
You become part of it, you get lost in it.
I go to the library a lot. I like the smell of the books. Sometimes I take my sketchpad.
I do a lot of drawings and then for this piece i've made several different models.
In terms of carving something, if it's really complicated I'll sometimes make a
model, sometimes a paper cut out, or tracing, or something like that.
That way I can block it out quicker and see if it works.
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I would say, most, all the time, I have some sort of sketch.
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When I started this piece I was thinking about the histories of museums.
They started when the Europeans were leaving Europe and discovering the New World.
They would bring back oddities like seashells that they've never seen before.
Guys would collect them and then they built cabinets to hold them in.
Later those cabinets became whole rooms and then those rooms of objects
eventually made their ways into museums. The drawers are more of a cabinet
feature, because I wanted parts of it to be like a cabinet. The cabinet of wonders.
What they contain are animal type things that the Wilkes expedition would have brought back.
I thought that it would be important to have some portraits,
portraits of artists.
I experimented with different papers and things like that at first. I wasn't
getting the fine detail that I wanted. Then I went back and I actually got
some parchment, some sheepskin parchment. I read up on that, how you get the
grease off and mounted a certain way so it doesn't warp. Then I had to
figure out a way how to learn how to paint portraits. I went to the library
and got a book on how to paint portraits. I have Gorki who I liked when I was
very young.
Stuart Davis, Romaine Brooks, who is fantastic.
Alan Ottleman who is one of my favorites.
I wanted to incorporate a lot of history of your building within my piece.
Your Museum used to be the Patent Office Building
the P-O-B. It used to be that when you had an idea for an invention
you are required to make a working model. All of those were on display
at one time.
But I didn't really want to replicate actual patent models like a sewing
machine.
I made a sewing machine but I took it from a Walter Murch painting. There's
a gumball machine by Thiebaud, the beer cans by Jasper Johns, the light bulb, not
Edison, but Jasper Johns lightbulb, packaging, campbell soup cans, things like
that. Some really terrific inventions like the electric chair that
came from Andy Warhol. The Sole of a Shoe from Philip Guston, which I like a lot.
The patent models seem to be a very important part of the history of the
building. This piece it has so many different aspects to it and I do so many
different types of things. I don't like to repeat myself and I like to
experiment a lot with different techniques and different things. I want
to do everything basically. I'd like to learn how to do everything.
I don't know, that's, what I guess inspires me. It's kind of fun.
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