Rosette Generation, (installation of): 8” x 96” x 108” overall, slip cast ceramics, carpeting, DVD animation, 2010
The Rosette Generation series was a body of work framed by geographic and cultural perspectives. The sources I sought out: cheap Styrofoam knock-offs of classic suburban decorative trim, the rosette, the mantle; are meant to operate as a mirror to the phenomena of the suburbs as much as a frame of mind and reflect the peculiarities of an “American” point of view.
The form and processes of this piece attempt to reflect on the monumental within the mundane, and seeks to bore out the middle of modernism to see its split-level by-products. The work has rotated around these axes operating as much a strategy of thinking as of making; one that takes ubiquitous forms of real estate imagery of suburbia and presents them for what they are (a flat plane, a marketed mirage) as well as what they promise to be (a moral retreat, a ideal future). Driven by generic real estate images, plebeian architectural ornamentation and utilizing search engine responses in image generation, this body of work combined new fabrication technologies, ceramics, and mixed media formats.
- Initial imagery culled from Google searches for suburban real estate.
- These images are flattened using the vector programs Adobe Illustrator.
- Imported into Sketchup the vector drawings are then stretched and altered into an ‘exploded’ view.
- Exploded view images are grouped and arranged to create rosette patterns inspired by those found in architectural ornamentation.
- These Sketchup models were then animated to create a digital environment which becomes part of the final piece and inside which the sculpture presumably operates.
- For the fabrication of the sculptural components the Sketchup files are unfolded using Sketchup plugins (such as “flatten”) or software such as Pepakura Designer.
- The patterns are printed out.
- Patterns rendered initially as paper models.
- Clay prototypes are made based upon these patterns.
- Plaster molds are created to fabricate ceramic multiples.
- Plaster molds.
- Slip casting of the various forms in a white stoneware and porcelain.
- The forms are bisque fired to 1200 degrees C.
- Finished glazed forms are fired to 1040 degree C for final glaze firing, glazed completely and fired on stilts.
- Final piece as displayed in “Fabricating Ideas” exhibition, in Philadelphia, PA.
- Chateaux Rosette, 11” X 40” X 40”, slip cast porcelain and white stoneware, 2009, photo: Ken Yanoviak (made at the EKWC).
- Mixed Development Rosette, 12” x 48” x 48”, slip cast porcelain and white stoneware, 2009, photo: Ken Yanoviak (made at the EKWC).
