https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3qQBA_2HZM - Documentation of this kinetic sculpture can be found at this link.
Title: Homemade
Year: 2018
Materials: 3D Printed objects made with Polylactic Acid Plastic (PLA) [i.e. furniture and moving heads], wood, fabric, paint, foam core, glue, motor, multi-colored battery operated puck lights
Dimensions (H x W x D):36” x 36” x 18”
Homemade explores the emotional pandemonium that takes place in the memories of domestic spaces. Originating at childhood, home informs our growth and instills our values. While reminiscing in one's childhood home, our memories are often paired with the objects that staged our recollections of events. This can be exemplified through sensorial associations like recalling grandmother’s mid-day, open-mouth-nap in her lazy boy recliner and its tan upholstery - that same chair that is then occupied by your sibling playing video games till late at night while the rest of the house sleeps. These objects are inextricably connected to their various users; consecrated in memory as necessary extensions or prostheses of grandma, brother, sister, mom, dad, cousin, friend, dog, or whomever may come to build these material bonds.
As this shelf rotates, its kinetic component mimics the passage of time similarly to that of an analog clock. The “home” furniture is adhered to every side of the shelf’s perimeter, assigning a timed life span to each space. The pieces of furniture serve as place holders for the viewer to project their own associations. As the piece continues to rotate, the configuration of the furniture, which may start to become the viewer's own, is re-assembled, re-scaled - disorienting and re-contextualizing our memories surrounding these various objects that we have come to hold sacred in our minds.
While inspecting each 3D printed piece in its fixed scene, a viewer's attention to the digitally replicated objects are interrupted by the startling crash of eight detached heads, darting through each level of the spinning unit, often free falling through spaces and plummeting to opposing walls. Each head is a scanned 3D print of my head posed, as a sort of self portrait, in an assemblage of different emotions: inquisitive, drowsy, happy, sad, calm, joyous, angry, confused, and annoyed.
As new experiences tinge our lives they also retroactively impact our relationships with past memories. With each new experience, the associations we've come to hold with the objects within our home suddenly morph. The thought of Grandma’s lazy-boy suddenly becomes less charming on the account that your sibling used to watch the cat pee on it every once in while.
Homemade aims to present a space for nostalgic projection, dissect personal attachments to objects, and question how the present informs the past and the past impacts the future.
Creating this piece served as a self exploration of finding home again after my father died this past summer. In losing one of the two most important people in my life, memories have been altered with a strange taste and hollow heart, leading me to hope to preserve the tangible evidence of home, a place he created for me. My admiration and intrigue of small objects and domestic spaces became born into existence. Homemade is an attempt to discuss the process of grief through a comical approach of vulnerability.
