Beware of the Robot

One of my first tasks in the foundation course was to use the word 'transform' on the foundation room.

The first thing that came into my head was to us all the spare cardboard boxes and create a robot. As a child, when you have multiple boxes to use at your will, you always want to make a house, a spaceship or a huge robot. Within the time period of 4 hours, I built the robot in 1 and that gave me 3 more to do something about the foundation room itself.

I immediately thought of putting the robot inside of a large city. With this in mind, I had to change the look of the class and make it recognizable to what it originally was. In order to do that, I needed quite a lot of implements. Luckily I had many more boxes to use and I also had large sheets of paper and a huge white piece of cloth. Using the rolls of paper, I was able to cover the back wall of my city. I used tape to stick them to the ceiling and some heavier objects to hold them down at the bottom. The cardboard boxes I had were used to fill in any gaps which I couldn't fill in with other objects. Blocking out the entire light coming from behind was unachievable because I couldn't hang anything down at certain areas.

I now had this large piece of cloth. It looked very plain on it's own and so I tried making it a bit more interesting. Using one of my architectural sketches, I asked my teacher to print it on acetate and then placed it down on a projector to display the image on the large piece of cloth. One didn't cover the whole area so I used two instead.

Using the remainder of what was left in the class, which included the tables as well as canvas, I blocked off the final side of the city. I blocked off any other entrances so as soon as you walked into the room, all you could see is my own city.

While doing this task and then looking at some artists, I looked up an artist named Louise Nevelson. Louise Nevelson (September 23, 1899 – April 17, 1988) was an American sculptor known for her monumental, monochromatic, wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures. What really got me interested in this artist was one of her works titled 'Dawn’s Wedding Feast - 1959-60 '

While looking at this artwork, I immediately got reminded back of the city I made myself. The work resembles one in many ways due to the tall sculptures as well as interesting casting inside of the boxes.

I myself didn't put anything inside the boxes in my installation, but there isn't anything that is stopping me from doing that in my next task.
Usually created out of wood, her sculptures appear puzzle-like, with multiple intricately cut pieces placed into wall sculptures or independently standing pieces, often 3-D. A unique feature of her work is that her figures are often painted in monochromatic black or white.

Another thing what got me interested was that all the objects were 'found'. She didn't use anything she already had, but instead looked around streets and picked up completely random items and then casted them either black or white before putting them inside a box. I have a more detailed analysis of the artists Right Here which explains my thoughts on the artist and how this artist links back to my work and how my work links to the artist.