While my younger son is cooking a molten lava meat and cheese and meat and bread and meat sandwich on his new George Foreman Grill, I'm envisioning something sculptural to build, after receiving the following "Call For Artists" description of an upcoming juried show:
disconnected invites visual commentary about how people, places, and things can today be uniquely connected, disconnected, or both at the same time. Just as art is subjective, our exclusive interpretation of any given situation, conversation or moment can instantaneously make us disconnected.
In years past, I would have submitted works already made that I felt fit the criteria of the theme, but this topic just begs for building something that's been arranging and re-arranging itself in my mind for some time.
So I mentioned to my guys that I had an idea for a sculpture, but I needed old computer parts, which I knew they have, because at one point we had at least thirty or more old monitors and towers, all in one room, collected mostly from the roadside as people replaced older technology with newer. We have old printers and floppy disks, motherboards, daughterboards, fans, hard drives, CPUs, ribbon cables, ethernet cables, PCI cards, sticks of RAM, wireless and wired mice; the list goes on and on. My husband even shocked me by offering some old circuit boards he had taken out of old VCRs.
The stuff is cool. I have no clue as to what any of it does but I plan to build something, adding old keyboards and broken cell phones, colored wires. I want to add a few things that partially still work, like an old answering machine if I can get it to keep looping the message and an alarm clock that randomly goes off. My husband has timers for his fish tanks so I may need to add one of them.
All of this is WAY out of my element. I'm comfortable with clay and painting and collage and photography, but I'm surrounded by computers and machines and the inner need to create something different, using a medium that I can't either glue or fire in a kiln. If I can add some rusty gears, I will. I have seen artists who make representational objects out of computer parts, like owls or snakes. This is not how I think or envision my sculpture.
Just as a good piece of writing captures a moment in time with words that the reader either connects with or doesn't, I want to make something that is barely recognizable yet pulls you in for a closer look and hopefully the viewer says yes, I get it. Or if they don't, they walk away but come back because something triggered a subconscious response, and they are curious. Better yet, they have questions.
After a long internet search I found a kindred soul, except this guy is an economist. Math, science, and art collide in his head; he can weld, and he has one of the best artists' websites I've ever seen. I'll start smaller, but who knows where one idea will lead.