Ready-mades can be confusing. Until recently, I had only glossed over the work of Marcel Duchamp. After having studied his work and thinking here and there, I find myself contemplating the notion that choice validates a work of art. Choosing an object and changing its context, viewing it anew outside of the role it was born into, requires the viewer to make a conceptual leap with the artist. This is something I've been trying to get my head around in my recent work. I come from a background in graphic design, woodworking and functional ceramics. I am expert at none of these pursuits, but feel compelled to continue using them as tools to communicate a message. In "Supplemental" last semester, I cast different shaped supplement bottles in porcelain and combined them to make a set of three different pairs of dumbbells placed on a dumbbell rack from a sports store. I used the rack as a readymade object to stage the fragile dumbbells which communicates how we depend on supplements not only for dietary reasons, but also agriculturally and conceptually. In a way, I was making a work in the spirit of Post Production by re-working a symbol of an industry producing supplements and changing it to comment on that industry. I also participated in the dialogue started by Duchamp by using the dumbbell rack as somewhat of a reference to his "winerack."
No comments:
Post a Comment