MATRYOSHKA SHELL

Critic: Justin Diles Spring 2017

This project is two fold. First, students are to aquire three small toys with divergent characteristics. For each of these toys, we are to abstract their qualities, be they formal or operational, and reconstruct these abstractions as a shell capable of housing the toy it is representative of. Included in each of these shells should be viewports, enabling the toy to be seen through its shell.

The second exercise is to design another shell, one which is able to house each of the three shells, designed with a logic that allows for conceptual cohesion between the disparate parts. This shell should also include viewports, enabling the visibility of its subsumed shells.

This particular project used a Pez Dispenser, a Harmonica, and a Gag Paper Clip (pretending to be a

Formal Logic of Each Shell:

Pez - Appropriates its massing from the toy and mimics its hinge to produce a viewport.

Harmonica - Wood/tin material binary becomes smooth/rigid tactility binary. Viewport dimensions vary in scale to parallel the pitch variations.

Paper Clip - Abstracted as connective and performative, this shell becomes an infrastructure with a stage for each toyshell. The toy, a metal line with a gap in it, is housed in this infrastructure's gap.

Outer Shell - Stretches tightly around this infrastructure, highlighting tensions between shells. One major viewpoint turns the three stages into a theatre set, each shell a performer. Paths of fenestration stretch across the surface, dappling light spots across the stages.

VII.

FIGURE / FIELD

Independent Project

Critic: Curtis Roth Fall 2019 - Summer 2020

This project started as a preliminary study for the La Brea Tar Pits project. The brief was to study the formal qualities of certain geological formations, and to make artifacts that mimic aspects of them through either plastic or plaster.

These artifacts had to be produced through a design system, wherein instructions given to another classmate could, and ultimately would produce the final models.

Two scripts were to be made for each geological formation: one meant to model the formation as a figure, another as a field. The system was tasked with abstracting the logics of pre-existant phenomena, and reapplying it in a way that satisfied specific formal expectations. The toggle between figure/field, and the nuances found between would go on to influence the formal system behind the natural history museum.

Following the semester, I pursued this project further. As individual objects, each artifact contained both figural and field like qualities. Various operations produced these qualities, oftentimes with some contradicting or competing with the operations of others. Surface articulation can produce these effects, but additionally so can coloration, slope, crops, and contrasts.

All of these operations can be found on the interior of a single artifact. Yet, as these artifacts array, another layer of figures and fields form. Some reinforce the figurality of the individual sculptures, others extend fields across the larger painterly composition. It's three dimensionality produces shifting interpretations as one looks at it from different angles, areas that once split at the threshold of the grid might be shown to blend seamlessly together.

This project is now in a private collection.

Detail: Carbon deposits form when chemical flames drag across the surface; the concavity in this model results in this plaster plume's widespread soot.

Detail: Edges between sculptures produce poche figures. Slope matching can connect fields across a diagonal, even when these figures intrude. DUNE