Overview of Project: Building and Un-building the Globe |
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For the project Building and Unbuilding the Globe, I account for the scope of American civilization, its productive past and how it has been spelled-out across our physical and cultural landscape. By using of a form of portraiture, I intend to distill our shared cultural heritage down to archetypal imagery as signifiers of the distinctly American character that has so changed the world. The model for this portrait will be the last-of-its-kind wooden Globe Elevator, which is currently being dismantled at St. Louis Bay in Superior, Wisconsin. The metaphor is a poignant one: an icon of the industrial age, it stood for 125 years as a funnel for the riches of a continent in full bloom, a temple to ravenous exuberance and the concept of endless growth. It required an entire forest for its construction, and over the course of a century disgorged itself of tens-of-millions of bushels of wheat for waiting world-markets. Today, as it is scavenged for its virgin timber and heavy metals, it is emblematic of market decline and post-productive anxiety.
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Thesis and Significance |
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| I work from a vantage point that sees American civilization as a production-based industrial event, the benificiary of a confluence of natural and human resources. My interest lies in personal identity and the forging of the American character. The relics of our mechanized past reveal our distinctly American legacy - most starkly realized along the industrial Great Lakes - and as such serve as our civilization's cultural barometer. But more than merely representative of an age, such structures stand as the grand total of the events that founded American culture, propelled a country toward world-hegemony and determined the course of nations. They are, in short, what we have to show for ourselves as a society, the heirlooms of our shared past and the foundations upon which our sensabilities have been built. | |
| Painting development: | |
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Painted in early 2009, Globe depicts the southeast end of annex 3 of the Globe Elevator system. Mixed processes were used to gain the many and varied visual and textural effects, including the use of ashes, sawdust, concrete, chalk, toilet paper, oil and house paint, spray paint and ignited gunpowder. I have recently completed a large 9-panel painting ( ~20' in length) that calls into question all aspects of my multi-tiered fascination with this structure - personal, spiritual, material, historical and contemporary - and will utilize much of what I learned from the text-driven concepts of the digital component of this project. The first showing of this work was at the October 2nd opening at State Street Gallery in Madison, Wisconsin. See Building and Unbuilding the Globe
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Digital development: The Pressures Brought to Bear Upon the Heavens
The Pressures Brought to Bear Upon the Earth
This digital compellation is a part of the larger, ongoing project, Building and Unbuilding the Globe. It concerns itself with a methodological framework though which I filter personal associations, means of validation and methods of investigation, especially by use of pairs: text - image, fact - fiction, yesterday- today, rational - irrational, mundane - sublime, evident - hidden, known - unknown, existence - nonexistence, the dead - the living, heaven - earth In this way I am able to more clearly see my own responses to certain locales, environs and events. The subject in this case, the Globe Elevator, is currently being dismantled in Superior, Wisconsin, scavenged for its millions of board feet of virgin timber. Structures such as these are representative of an age and indeed of American civilization. The events of their rise and fall hold in them myriad meanings and implications ranging the breadth of human existence. But what concerns me here is the sense I make of it, my impressions, my concerns and my personal reaction to this particular site, these particular structures. |
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