Backbone Metals

-Stay Tuned

My work is the evolution of my observations on human behavior, the world, its population and my place within it.

Much of the information that drives what I do is derived from empirical data and my interpreting and evolving notion of survival. This is something that I have found has multiple layers of meaning, which has led me down subsequent paths into  fields such as history, anthropology, psychology, and medicine as I investigate their significance for my own work.

As a trained metal smith, I also find myself being haunted by the ghost of our nation’s once thriving industrial age. I am very interested in the social and cultural implications of our shift from a production to a consumptive society; the integrity with which we make things; and, the decisions we make as we forge our paths into the future.

My attempts to focus these ideas into a clear image often leaves me struggling in the midst of an insolvable conundrum. Luckily, this serves as fuel for my further scrutiny of the impact that is created by the six billion (and growing) individuals of this planet as they engage in moment-to-moment struggle with each other, their environments and themselves.

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One thing I have learned by being relatively observant in the strange times that we live is that deception can be a very effective tool. In the hands of the powerful, it can have lasting effects, which run deep, and wide in our culture.

In 1955 Victor LeBeau, an economic analyst, proposed this thought to the leaders of America in beginning of the Cold War.

“Our enormously productive economy… demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption… We need things consumed, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever accelerating rate.”

The very nature of what Mr. Lebeau put forth is deceiving in perhaps the worst way. It not only seeks to fool the American people that they need, and will perpetually continue to need a great many things that they in fact do not, it also encourages an association between consumption and our spiritual beliefs by ritualization.

I don’t think it is a very hard case to prove that the powers that be, then, listened to Mr. LeBeau with attentive ears while they planed the various policies that would take root in the decades to come.

I also do not think that it would be too difficult to show how this has changed our economy from a nation of producers to a nation of consumers. Nevertheless, I feel like there are more consequences that exist, whether planned or not, that weigh heavy on us in our struggle to survive today. I shudder to think of the ways in which this idea has, over the decades, infiltrated us via our educations and the media to transform our behavior from that of industriousness to dependence.

How does all of this translate when we think of the rest of our society? How has this affected our morality and ultimately our evolution? With all of this in mind, I arrive to this question – How has this affected our creativity and subsequently the art we make?

-Stay Tuned

- Stay Tuned

The complexity of working in a “life sized’ scale has been challenging and very time consuming for me. Despite the completion of “ Machines of Understanding” (which you have see in older posts) I made the decision to shift gears recently and focus on a few smaller projects.

I spend a lot of time looking at objects, considering their form and relevance. I look for evidence of their functions, traces of wear and tear, and any other indications of why that object may exist. This is probably normal for a visual artist, but I often wonder how many people do this. It is something that I find enormously valuable and fun, and yet when I examine the cultures that overlap and form our society, I find very little evidence of what I would consider to be material awareness.

Moving from an industrial to a service culture has undoubtedly been responsible, in part, for this and I think it is likely that we will continue to see the effects of these consequences ripple throughout our lifetimes. The consumerism born out of this shift in our social and economic lifestyle discourages our knowledge of materials and pacifies us with cheap, available replacements for anything that falls out of the realm of perfect. Our media culture also keeps us distracted by moving much faster than what, I believe, is needed to truly digest information and make relevant decisions.

With all of this, it is hard for me to consider how anyone can both stay plugged in to our society and still maintain a relative grip on their consciousness, let alone take time to notice the subtleties of the objects we are surrounded by all the time. They just do not seem to be compatible to me.

Here is a piece that acts as viewing scope of sorts. It holds a magnifying lens that, in conjunction with a concealed light source, reveals the physical details of its contents.

This is my way of intentionally creating an atmosphere and a devise that shows the complexity and beauty of the simple things we seem to take for granted.

- Stat Tuned

Here is a video not all that dissimilar to the Power of 10 by Charles and Ray Eames. It takes you on a time-compressed trip out to the edge of measured space and then back again.

I have often dreamed that I would be able to do this one-day either with some technology that was secretly bestowed to me by a rogue alien scientist or by becoming the apprentice of an omnipotent “Q-like” being.

Either way, this video is pretty great and I recommend turning the volume down and playing Black Sabbath’s Who Are You while you watch.

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Over the years I have grown apart from my interests in Hip Hop. This, no doubt, is because of the direction the genre has been pushed in over the last decade. Nevertheless, I trudged through my adolescence listening, and being shaped by what I consider to be the golden age of Hip Hop and feel certain loyalties to it still.

Those days are gone unfortunately and have been replaced, as most things are in our culture, by a poorly simulated version of itself designed to mimic the stereotypes related to the cultural origins of the music for profit and other dubious reasons.

Despite that, Immortal technique has somehow held the line that Chuck D ,  KRS-1 and many others drew in the sand back in the mid 80ies.

-Stay Tuned