Dream Galaxy

The work is meant to reflect coherency and instability in relationships and in life through movement of like and different shapes and materials which seem to separate and come together in different areas of the sculpture.  Because of weather conditions and our own carelessness the land we live on changes over time.  In trying to understand life and the world we live on I am led to think about something even larger like the galaxy.  We know that planets live in the galaxy although we could not and we may not ever know what could lurk in that dark endless sky.  We also like to think that all things have a beginning and an end but that is not true about the galaxy.  Dream Galaxy is in a circular motion as if it is an on going thing.  Like life the galaxy could move from beginning to end and then restart the process all over again.  My work has to do with the ongoing process of loss of control and finding ways to gain some sort of control back again so in reality and the work there is instability, movement, and togetherness in certain places.  I have attempted to make different objects alike.  I am interested in creating a mystical space where it can look dangerous and soft at the same time, but to also in part put the two opposites together almost in a strange harmony.  Here I want to make dreams and the unknown real tangible objects.

At the time that Dream Galaxy was created I was involved with a man who was physically, verbally, and sexually abusive.  At the same time I had just started College.  College was fine in that I had plenty of friends and I was doing at least average in my classes.  I seemed to enjoy and do best in the studio art classes I took.  I believe that art was my release and without it I would have been mentally ill.  It was as if I was leading a double life at the time.  At school everything was moving along smoothly with friends, and work.  At home more than at school I would have to deal with the abuse in the physical sense.  I dealt with thinking about the abuse in my mind constantly.  At the time I never verbalized to anyone what was really going on, instead I tried to pretend everything was fine.  I felt trapped.  If I confided in someone I thought they would think less of me because that is how I thought of myself and I did not know how to get out of the abusive relationship.  There were times when I was happy with the relationship, but I never knew when he was going to strike me or yell at me so the nightmares from when I was a child became real.  My emotions were like an on and off switch going from happy to frightened and sad in an instant.    

Dream Galaxy is a sculpture that looks frightening or dangerous to its viewers because of the jagged points on its top.  The main dense part of the sculpture has free floating spheres circling around it and sharp curvilinear objects that freely circle it and pierce through another object in the sculpture.  I purposely painted everything that the sculpture consists of in dark colors.  I carved the main very dense object to look unsteady as if it could tip over and roll away at any moment.  If some one or something was to try to live on the sculpture they might run into one or many of the objects it is composed of or they might trip and fall off of the sculpture because they would be attempting to almost conquer a something unknown to them.

            It is obvious that the unstable look of the sculpture is due to the way that I carved it out but this also gives it movement.  The curvilinear structure moves around the main portion of the sculpture from wide to thin.  Peaks and spheres also have movement floating and using one another to make their way around the main structure.  Even the blue cube at the top of the sculpture slightly turns as if in motion.  I am hoping that people can see from this a repetitive circular movement.

            The materials and shapes were meant to be both alike and different.  The lace and screen material look soft in comparison to the styrophoam, clay, and plastic that I used.  The spheres are important because there are several small spheres and a large one where I used colors black and gold.  The spheres are both plastic and styrohpoam.  The lace and screen copy each other by making a triangular shape.  The large gold styrophoam sphere is held in by the screen material which is similar to how the lace wraps around a small black styrophoam sphere.     

            I began work on the sculpture by first listening to the song “Cristofori’s Dream” by David Lanz, which sounded sad but had a brighter melody underneath.  I asked music major Carly Harvey a music major at Saint Mary’s College of Maryland to give me her expert input about the song.  Carly explained that it sounded like a song about a person who lost a loved one, but all is not lost because the person still has memories of the happy times they had with the person they have lost.  I agree with Carly’s description although I think that the song could be about ending and starting relationships, disappointments and good happenings in order to find one’s place in life, and the cycle in which one’s life ends and another begins.  This way the song is relational to a much larger audience. 

As I listened to “Cristofori’s Dream” I created three collages and a frontal sculpture.  The frontal sculpture was unsuccessful because it was much too literal being of a large monster peering over a strange tree with an empty baby swing hanging from it.  I thought it was unfortunate that the sculpture was obviously in a dream like setting and the monster probably devoured or did something else horrible t the baby.  My final project was much more open for interpretation in that I was not trying to create recognizable figures and objects.

 I worked mainly from the first collage I created because I found it to be the most interesting.  The background of it was white paper.  I added pointy strips of black tissue paper along the top and bottom of the page.  In the middle of the page I placed a maroon squiggly line of paper.  Among the other objects in the page I put circles of peach colored tissue paper. 

Like the collage my final product was created light and easily moldable and movable materials.  I started by making a large dense structure out of styrophoam having a pointy top, five sides, and painted almost completely black.  Left over styrophoam allowed me to make peaks for the structure which were painted black but left with streaks of white.  Around the main structure and on the peaks I placed small plastic gold spheres from a McDonald’s playpen, small black styrophoam spheres, and a large gold styrophoam sphere.  I decided to add a sort of pathway that is curvilinear.  I made four of these structures of wire, paper, and mostly of clay and chose to paint them maroon.  The curvilinear structures just mentioned as pathways are held up by the peaks but also by a small blue cube that I cut out of styrophoam.

            Since I was a child movies such as Hellraiser have been inspirational through the art work in the movie and the strange dreams or nightmares that would follow.  The blue cube in my sculpture reminds me of the gold box in the movie Hellraiser.  I did not intend for any part of the sculpture to be similar to the movie although not only the blue cube is similar but also the darkness and strangeness to the sculpture is like the movie.