i waited a decent interval before i brought in the deviant little sculptures. you want your coworkers to think you're weird, but only a little - trust me on this one. i therefore omitted the origins of things i have scattered here & there on my desk:
these are constructed out of eyeglass lenses & parts, wire, pen parts, adding machine roll cores, & most importantly, nail polish and crazy glue. if you are looking for an excellent polymer to bond plastics, look no further. a combination of standard liquid crazy glue, applied in layers along with a clear nail polish, makes an incredibly durable adhesive. makes epoxy look like kindergarten paste. smells pretty good too.
in the first picture i've pointed out a few of the many bizarre aspects of these thingys. these are around seven years old now. the one with five lenses stuck together? it was dropped, recently, on a hard surface. one of the lenses cracked, but the adhesive did not fail. in fact all of these things have survived seven or more years being moved around stuffed in boxes & so forth. now, the second one, it's the most deviant of all, because at some point it began to be ... something. it's ... it's some sort of postapocalyptic industrial processing facility. really. & like most postapocalyptic things, it's made out of a little bit of everything, all of which is garbage.
see that's the sticky part, the part where you inquire where i got all those eyeglass lenses, & i answer, lenscrafters. what, they give them to you, you ask? well, sort of. i mean, they just threw them away. & they had the cleanest garbage i've ever seen. it wasn't icky at all, & for a time in my life i was able to have a nice wardrobe of prescription eyeglasses i wouldn't have otherwise been able to afford -- how did i know they were my prescription? held them up to my eyes, if i could see out of 'em, they were. oh, i know you're saying eww right now. then again i bet you never found a 27" stereo color television in a dumpster because it had an imperceptible scratch on the picture tube. look, i didn't get in the dumpster, i didn't get icky, i just had many many pairs of glasses & some leftovers. in the course of fixing up discarded eyewear, i made the accidental discovery of the glue/polish polymer, & i had all this nail polish & of course a nice junk drawer full of bits of this & that & well, things just ... happened. i also discovered that really interesting things happen when you pour glitter nail polish into the concave part of a plastic lens & set fire to it. not that you should ever do that! i've done it, so you don't have to. the answer? extremely interesting blackened bubbly glittery textured blob & a smell that honestly never ever goes away. ever.
i have more things, i need to get them in some good strong light & get pictures of them too, they're madly interesting little pieces of trash.
Things just...happened. I love that line. "why did you hit your brother in the eye?" "It just happened". Of course the unscripted free form that makes up a life is also something that just happens... So what the hell do I know?
Those are soooo cool! ...and so is the story of their history!
Thanks for the tips. I'll try them outside in the open air...
awww dan.. be brave.. huff a little bit of glue ;) I love your beautiful art kd.. my favorite way to see something recycled.. and dang.. i wanna go dumpster diving one day.. i've heard it's a blast..
Hey Liz...could you call me at my home number...I have a few questions I need to ask you. If its to late or you are busy i will talk to you in the morning. Mysterious or not...i think those little things are cool.
can i just say again how much i love this look on you? stunning, i say!
Those are really cool. I don't know what's going on here because even when I type a comment the letters are all funny little boxes. Hmmm... Is there a magic decoder ring I'm missing or something?
I had to have the content of this post forwarded to me via e-mail from somebody else, because my work browser just isn't seeing it right.
I'm weird like you in this way, anyway. I was driving through a "bad" part of Houston years ago (of course it was just a predominantly Black neighborhood: not bad), when I saw a recently cleared lot with a heap of over 50 TVs, none of them working. At the time I was making sculptures out of TVs. I stopped and rooted around in them, picking out pretty chassis. Some old guys from next door came over and talked to me. I may have been wearing a dress? It had rained so there was dried mud caked in the open ones, and I was banging them together to loosen the dirt (without the tubes in them). I was grinning and trying to explain to them how happy I was to find these broken, dirty, old TVs. They laughed. I think they were laughing at me not with me.
I recommend dumpster diving near department stores, if there's access. I used to find lots of acrylic and chrome display stuff that I never knew what to do with, but it sure was pretty.
Yes, more pictures please.
i used to go to the mall dumpsters, those were the best, though i would generally focus on the lenscrafters dumpster while chris would wander around hitting the electronics & whatnot. i think they put the dumpsters behind locked gates now. which is rather sad when you think about it, stuff bound for the landfill & they make good & sure it's going to get there.
The Georgia is new, right? Georgia is my favorite. except for , then I opt for Lucida. Georgia and Lucida. The girls.
i was all lucida console on the last one (but that was after a long period of georgia) & now i'm georgia & verdana both, there's actually a pattern to it but i don't have it all worked out yet. but it's on purpose, the serif/sans serif living together. see, if you link something the link is sans-serif. which i think looks cool. however i am weird.
You are too mad for words! The "most deviant of all" sculpture looks to have been a bong at some point. But you didn't hear that from me.
I think I tried the serif/sans serif text/link thing before. Must go back; tres cool. You definitely have a knack for this.