Advanced Sculpture, 2014

Project 1: Process

Justin Masterson

Dr. Scheer

Intention Statement

My intentions going into this project were to depict some sort of feeling through the application of process. I thought a lot about process and how it could communicate certain things.  I tried to generate my own kind of verb list like Richard Serra did centered around notions of death, breaking down, deteriorating.  I am interested in the idea of making something that appears so destructive but is still aesthetically beautiful.  With that I came up with breaking, drying, dying, and dehydrated.  I thought about various pieces of art I had studied that lost some of their completeness to the trials of time.

I decided to use plaster and dried flowers as my main medium.  Being my first go at using plaster it was interesting in that sense.  I chose plaster because I knew it would illustrate cracking easily.  Also, the whiteness of plaster as well as the fact that you can manipulate it in many ways also attracted me.  I knew I wanted a contradiction of rough, smooth, and broken throughout the piece. I also concluded to leave the detritus and broken plaster on the floor as it fell off in order to contribute to the idea of process art.  

Over the break I lost my god brother to a car accident.  Additionally, one of my friends throughout high school stabbed his mother to death.  With these losses I have just been down in general as well as thinking about the fragility of life.  I decided I wanted to use art to sort of express some of these feelings. I was also thinking about relationships and how they may fade with time or you can screw them up entirely.  I wanted to narrate how even after you go back and try to fix things they are never going to be the same no matter how hard you try.  I think I communicate that last thought through the cracking and re applying plaster, also sort of dressing it up in a way with the flowers which can also add narrative to the death ideas.  I felt that the lighting and shadows could have the most direct contrast in the blankness of the material color.  I think I should have dipped the flowers in plaster themselves because I think that would have incorporated them better.  

Another thing I like about art is abstract form.  I think form is a very true form of beauty.  I wanted the uppermost piece to look very light but I would say that the balance of weight throughout the three pieces is off a bit.  I feel I could have done better incorporating the three into each other.  I also feel at one point the second form looks a little too much like a bouquet.  This may be read as too much narrative.  Finally the weight of the pieces are in awkward areas so installation was difficult. Ideally I could have avoided this but I believe it is contributed to by the fact that I am an amateur artist.

Overall, I am unsure if I communicated what I set out to communicate to someone who had not heard my explanation.  I believe it does look sort of sad which is all I can really ask for on the surface.  I thought of new ideas as the piece developed and that may have detracted from having a fully cohesive piece.