My concept for this piece was inspired by Richard Serra’s piece The Matter of Time at the Guggenheim in Bilbao. A few years ago I visited this exhibit, and only remembered it recently when this project was assigned. My first idea for this project was to create a mask that viewers can wear/interact with. I wanted the mask to face a projector so the viewer could literally step into my head and see/hear/thinking what I do. However, after reading more about Richard Serra, I think his style of sculpture expresses how I also want to express my ideas. Serra’s pieces are pretty simple, only using a few pieces attached together to create gigantic spirals. The spheres create movement and produce different effects depending on where you’re standing within or outside of it. When I went to the exhibit, I remember getting lost within the spirals, touching the walls and making sounds that echoed off of them. I was in a different world entirely. When I exited the exhibit and went to the floor above, I saw the spiral in a completely different way. Instead of being engulfed within its world, I could make sense of its movement from above. He uses the entire room as a sculptural field, which makes the sculpture disorienting-splicing the way the viewer remembers it happening.
I really enjoyed the pure simplicity of Serra’s works. I want to model my work after this simplicity, and focus more on the idea and concept behind a work and how it reacts with its viewers. My idea is to make a giant coffee filter, an interactive piece that the viewer can unfold and look at. I want my piece stable so it can be played with an examined. The coffee filter idea came from the artist Natalia Rodionova who created a giant slinky-like sculpture out of cardboard.
The coffee filter as a symbol signifies the dreams I’ve been having recently. After looking up the meaning, coffee filters symbolize a disturbance in psyche and a sort of off-balance. I want to create a giant coffee filter to purge my mind of its visual presence. I want the filter’s participatory feature to be a function of its simplicity, and to share and “re-balance” itself through the viewer’s interactions.
