I am participating in this show at Claremont Graduate University.  It is a collaborative installation created by the students of CGU Art, taking the Installation Seminar.

INDecent Proposition

Show is open from November 26th to December 14th Gallery Hours: M-F 8am-5pm Group show including Artists: Vera Bauluz Jacqueline Bell Johnson Janelle Borsberry Andrea Breiling Jeremiah Catling Adrian Culverson Clayton Ehman Suzanne Utaski Gibbs Katie Grip Scott Jamieson Takeshi Kanemura Abdul Mazid  Stephanie Meredith Julie Orr Augusto Sandroni Jette Via Patch Wright Jo Anna Zelano Show Statement (written by Jeremiah Catling) This exhibition is a collaborative effort, put together by a group of students involved in the installation art class here at CGU. This is a collection of moveable objects, initially gathered in between the two gallery spaces so that they can then be freely moved from one space to another. These works result from a single directive and a short timeline: within two weeks construct a piece that can travel between the galleries. The two galleries, one titled Decent, and the other Indecent, invite the viewer to interact in a visual organization of the works. Whether one person sees a piece as decent and moves it into the gallery, while another disagrees and puts it in indecent, or if the work appears too nebulous to the viewer and they want to leave it in the lobby space, this exhibit wants to explore how we create and dismantle consensus. The show is itself a question of taste: is it decent to touch works, to move them, and engage with them, or is there value in overcoming the indecency of interacting physically with art? How do we as a culture categorize and understand art, and how do we define what is decent and indecent in the objects that are present? Is art itself decent? How definite are our own views?  And what happens when we put a bunch of stuff on wheels and start moving it around?

http://www.facebook.com/events/485428221504089/

The Possibilities of Failure

This is a piece built for an outdoor space called the "Nook" over at the CGU art campus.  The space used to house the dumpsters for that building and when they were relocated it became a place for the installation class.  I have been scavenging from the woodshop scrap bin for a while and have been reusing it on different projects as needed.

This piece is a result of the idea of creating a line with many perpendicular lines coming off of it and then bending that line to see how it alters their curvalinear progression.  I started with creating a pair of strips of steel 24 feet long.  I took these wood scraps of mine and sandwiched them between the steel then wrapped them up nicely with some decorative threading in twine.  Added a little bit of color with some dry brush of lavender.  This line was then carried by a team of friends and myself out to the nook.  

I proceeded to bend the strip (this is no small chore, it took my entire body to get it to go) in the space.  The cotton snapped in the process of carrying out there, and while bending it into shape.  I figured it was a possibility, but did not expect it to break to the extent that it did.  Furthermore, the curves I had in mind were much bigger, so that you could walk through the piece.  It was way too heavy, and too rigid to create the image I had in my head.   

So I was forced to settle for what the piece would allow, and not what I wanted.