Building a Printing Press

My sculpture class too a field trip to a scrap yard to find metal objects for a welding project. Besides a few pieces of square stock I came across what appears to be some sort of industrial press (possible for flattening small rolls of metal?). My excitement peeked when I realized that the machine was only a few minor modifications away from a small printing press, something I was planning to one day build from scratch. Now I basically had every piece I would need. The bonus: The woman showing us around had “a soft spot for the arts”, and decided to donate all we could scrounge up to the cause. In other words letting us get away with what had to be half a ton of metal for free! What a generous woman.

Taking the machine back to the workshop, me and a friend, Mark Reedy (basically my studio assistant in the project, ha-ha), started to take the thing apart so we could clean off the beautiful light coating of rust and mud that build up over its time in the elements. A wondrous occasion I can only describe as “Man Time”, a bonding experience where guys build stuff.

So far the progress is smooth going, with only a few hitches concerning the workshop’s lack of tools, but it seems we have all the parts we’ll need to make the press, which is quite exciting. The downside, however, is that the project doesn’t particularly pertain to the assignment at hand, so I’ll have to devote the majority of my time and effort to a second project, pushing the progress of this one to one day a week we’ve set aside.

I plan to document the progress of the project on this blog with images and the occasional shaky-cam video, so stay tuned.

The bearing housing that allows the raising and lowering the main roller to specific height is identical to a printing press. What a good find!

If you have any idea what this machines real purpose was, please let me know!

"6"

"6"

In a stint of delirium, I went down a hallway outside the room where I was waiting for my class and changed all the locks of the lockers to six. I call the piece “6”. Is this art? I think so, if you’re going to call placing cans of cat food on watermelons art. In your face Gabriel Orozco!

Wood and Metal

This semester in college marked the first time I have worked with metal, learning and utilizing multiple techniques of welding, including: MIG, which uses argon to heat up and bond metal; brazing, which includes heating two pieces of metal and melting brass between them, sandwiching the two pieces of metal together; and plasma cutting, which is used to get clean cuts when cutting shapes from a sheet of metal. I was scared while learning the techniques at first, making sure the professor was monitoring me the first few times I put a flaming torch in my hands. Fire, being one beast, is quite different than electricity, being almost unpredictable, and still somewhat mysterious compared to the archaic, primordial fear of fire. I soon put my fears aside and was quick to learn the procedures, however, producing my first piece that involved welding in its creation. I look forward to using my new skills to make more pieces in the future.

Pictured here are my first attempts at brazing, MIG welding and plasma torch cutting.

This is also the first time I have carved wood to create three-dimensional sculptures. Comparing working with metal, a hot, angry, and aggressive process involving fire, gas, blinding light, and sparks, is quite different from the raw, natural, calm and rugged process of working with wood. Given the choice between the two I would pick metal, as it’s a new endeavor for me, but I would prefer the less aggressive nature of wood. I did, however, hurt my self a lot more while carving then I did welding. My hands are a bit manlier now, though. A little finger mutilation builds character.

Here’s my little tribal man, influenced by Chinese mingqi burial figures.

Here’s my zoomorphic rat, also inspired by Asian art.

Atop "Star-Crossed"

The sculpture “Star-Crossed” by Nancy Holt, is behind the art museum in Oxford Ohio. Sometimes, between classes I like to hike my way up to the museum and sit in the top of the sculpture (like many people apparently, as there’s garbage all around it, sadly). It’s a fun piece, something you can climb in and on, really interact with, a big contrast to the pieces inside the museum, which are behind glass and you wouldn’t DARE touch. It reminds me of a rain tunnel (I may have made that term up); the big tunnels that collect the runoff rain from streets and send it funneling into the sewer. Some of the big ones look mysterious, and passing them by on the side of the street you kind of feel an urge to go in them and see where they lead to. Maybe they lead to some river deep in the forest where all the rain tunnels end at. But maybe doing that is probably dangerous. Star-Crossed allows you to somewhat experience that, by walking through a big tunnel going through the big mound of dirt in the center, and climb up the smaller tunnel sitting on the top. The interactivity with the piece also makes it seem like a jungle gym, or some kind of climbing structure you would find in a play ground, but instead of colorfully painted aluminum, it’s concrete and dirt (perhaps an adult play ground). Otherwise being a fun sculpture to climb, I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean. The shallow concrete “pool” at the back of the sculpture, and at the mouth of the smaller tunnel leading upwards, is a mystery to me. It’s full of garbage now, but I’m sure it has a purpose that involves the overall meaning of the piece. Maybe I’m wrong and the only intention is for it to be a piece you can interact with, simple as that. Sure the name might hint at something, but I want it to remain mysterious.

"Happy Cows, Happy Meals" - Plaster Cast Sculpture

I wanted to do something with barrels, barrels and cars. Something about pollution and how fossil fuel wasn’t a really sustainable fuel source. I had an idea that involved a pyramid made of barrels with a Hummer on top, but the sketch I did wasn’t really interesting, and was too simple. I also had made a mold of a toy cow, so I tried to find a way to relate the two, the cow and the oil barrels. Nothing came to mind, until I was referred to the book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan, and how in the book it was revealed that it took one barrel, per cow, to raise it, feed it, transport it to slaughter and to restaurant, and to cook it. This I had never heard of, but now I had a topic for my piece.



It’s said that America consumes more beef than any other country in the world, and when people think mass production of beef, they think hamburgers, and when they think hamburgers, they get hungry for Mac Donald’s. Mac Donald’s is one of the largest producers of hamburgers in the world, selling Happy Meals in countries all over the world. Obviously hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil a year is used to transport this beef around the world.

The oil barrels are the base of the piece, representing all the gallons of oil used to transport the beef to market and restaurants. The plastic grass surrounding the box implies the ground, with the barrels underneath, insinuating the origin of the oil. The three plaster cows are casted from a mold of a plastic child’s toy, making the piece cynical yet innocent, also representing the free toy in every child’s meal, 90% of the reason for buying the meal in the first place, the food, which took thousands of dollars to get there, becoming second. The cows are being led up a ramp into a red, smiling happy meal box, almost like if it were a herd of cattle being led into a slaughter house, and the mouth of a smiling child. Inside the happy meal slaughterhouse is a hung cow carcass, cleaned and prepared for freezing and shipment, ready to be part of a child’s Happy Meal.

(Photo Credit to Roscoe Wilson)

(Untitled) - Wood Sculpture

I didn’t have a plan going into the wood project. I did some preliminary sketches but they didn’t relate to what I eventually produced. I went with my feelings, and started cutting strips of wood. I tried to make interesting shapes, and ultimately just had fun without any vision in mind. When I had a good pile of strips, I played with the pieces, seeing how they related to each other; what looked nice and interesting. I wanted the piece to look natural and organic, so I decided not to use any screws or adhesives, and just stuck to peg and hole methods of holding the piece together. I sanded several of the pieces in order to reduce kinks, and make it look like each piece flowed into the next without any transitions.

What I ended up with was abstract, and had no real meaning or inspiration. It was a just go-with-my-feelings piece, but I was thinking of the way fish feed when I was constructing it, so maybe there was some subconscious contributions to the way the sculpture turned out. It does resemble some sort of tentacled mass, reminiscent of some abomination born out of Lovecraft’s mind, reaching up from the depths of the sea.

Recycling a Plate

Something that I’ve done in the past is resurface old/ abandoned etching plates left by past art students, by scraping off the old image. Usually these plates would remain in a drawer in the art room forever, but once resurfaced I can use the plate again to etch my own image onto it. This reflects my passion for recycling, and my pet peeve of things not being utilized to their full potential.

The process of resurfacing a plat involves me using a scrapper, a triangular-prism shaped tool to scrape down the surface of the plate until it’s even with the image that they’ve etched into it. This process is not only time consuming but demands a lot of physical work, bordering on arduous. The result is a free plate that I would had to have paid for otherwise, and the relief of another plate that would have ended up sitting there in that drawer, forever, until it was eventually thrown away.

The most current plate that I’ve taken to the task of resurfacing is already almost completely blank. Two days of scrapping and the image on the plate is almost completely erased. Making prints of the plate lets me know what area of the plate needs to be worked on further.

Even though scraping only take off a small bit off at a time, I can amass quite a sizable amount of shaving after a few hours.

Here is a print at the beginning of the day, and a few hours of scrapping after.

In every consecutive print, the image becomes fainter and fainter, until the image is finally gone, and the plate is blank once more, ready for a new image to be etched into it.