Description
This short box features a top opening covered with green-tinted glass which gives a green cast to its interior. The central back panel is a black-and-white photo of society folks sitting at a banquet table. A square window is cut into this photo, revealing another photo, this one of an arctic scene, with a man in a parka wielding a whip and his sled dogs in the foreground of the photo. Just in front of the banquet panel is a constructed trough collaged with a snippet of a color drawing of a bathroom scene. Lying, sprawled lengthwise, in the trough is a dirty white plastic figure of a muscular man in a loincloth. And lying in front of the trough is a snippet of text reading, “So little is still known about the ordinary habits.” The floor of this piece is covered with a maroon-and-gold, floral-patterned wallpaper sample. The inside side panels of this box are collaged with the painting Office at Night by Edward Hopper. On each side panel is a mounted square basket collaged with an algebraic formula and containing a few exotic postage stamps. The outside of the box is covered in a dark blue wallpaper sample with a sprawling abstract floral design. The back of the box features a still photo from the film classic The Mummy and a text caption providing the title of this piece, The Strange World Of Nature.
Thoughts
The titles of my pieces are a means to cohere the elements of an assemblage under the umbrella of a simple, if sometimes ambiguous, idea. The majority of my titles are gleaned from found text, often snippets saved from the excised sections of previously used clippings from past assemblages. I can discover these snippet titles at any point in the making of a piece or even before any assembling has begun when I’m still at the stage of gathering materials and sketching out the artwork. This piece had several working titles over the time of its construction, and when it was nearly finished, I searched through my collection of text scraps and tried to find a title that resonated. There’s a physical phenomenon that occurs commonly with stringed instruments called sympathetic vibration. This is when one string in close proximity to another string will vibrate when its neighbor is plucked or bowed giving richness and character to the timbre of that musical instrument. When selecting a title, either original or found on a scrap of paper, I rely on intuiting this sympathetic vibration, in the metaphorical sense. I landed on the title of this piece, The Strange World Of Nature, not because it described anything in particular, but because it caused the other parts of this assemblage to speak with a resonant and unifying voice.
