Scale

The issue of scale is recurrent in much of your work, the google maps, the plaster landscapes, and most clearly in your current thesis work, this is really a two part question, first how do you see you work contributing to a dialogue about scale, or what do you want us to know about your relationship to scale?


January 21, 2008 6:32 PM
Blogger sanone trombone said...

thanks for the great response. I'm glad you brought up scale here, as this was one of the issues that seemed relevant to the Laurie Anderson interview you posted. I can totally/and viscerally respond to the shift of scale you describe, and there are several conversations I would like to engage you with about that. First, you say that it is a way of being more objective.. this seems really similar to what Anderson is saying, but I cant help thinking that this is really saying that what we do is so small that any objective scale we apply to it becomes calculated in units so small as to be functionally meaningless! I am not against this way of thinking, and I think it is pretty damn sane/true, but is this what you mean, is this what you think she means?
(I posed that as a question to you, but it is more of a real (lets have a conversation) question to you than it is an interview question. I do have a tendency to extrapolate....)


Also when I said I viscerally respond to your description of scale, I can back that up by explaining that a thing I have done since I was a wee girl, is to shut my eyes (not only in bed) and make things shrink and grow in my minds eye. The reason I mention this is that even though it is a really familiar thing to me, yet I don't address it directly in my art and you do! So I'm thinking that it is a really fundamental issue for your art.


How (or do) your molds relate to scale? I can see them as an almost more nuanced comment about the portability (or the futileness of trying to port) landscape.

SS Behind you here is this a landscape or a topographical map? (image?)

SH Yeah, its in the works, the drill holes are just to get at a certain depth, and eventually I'll carve them away. This isn't necessarily for the show.

SS There is something really exciting and kind of ticklish about a landscape carved out of wood, the lines in the wood are similar to strata, but they way they are going here is different and... when we think of the gorge as being carved out by water, ... so it is that scale thing again, except this time you are REALLY BIG. Its like you're god carving out the earth... SHELBY (in low god voice).

Laughng

SH Yeah, do you think its a criteria that all artists have somewhat of a god complex in some form?

SS um.... I don't.... well you have to believe in god for that to be a relevant question..

Laughing

SH Touche'

SS so Iguess I'd say no.
But I do have some sympathy for that argument,...but

SH They're levels of modesty but, I don't know, (laughs) I don't feel like God when I'm carving. HAA HAAA (in god voice).

SS But there is this, we say god, I don't know why it needs to be attached to god, but there is this joy of creation that is, its like play. Productive play, like when you are a kid and you are building a fort, or you're making something and you totally go to that change of scale place when you are a kid too, its joyful, I don't think that means “ownership of creation.”

SH I like that thing you were telling me that you used to close your eyes and think about things being different sizes and you being smaller or something.

SS Yeah I could do it right now.

SH Yeah, me too.

SS and you can stretch them too!

SH My whole first year, if I had to sum it up in one medium, I would say google earth. I was obsessed with that last lear, because of that reason, the change of scale and you can go in and out so fast. It made everything so different depending on the scale or the elevation you were viewing at. It was really cool, it still is, I haven't done it in a while but I get a massive kick out of playing around with google earth.