After six weeks of work on this dumpster titled ‘Gated Communities’ its final detailing is complete. I finished work on it this past Monday and traveled back to Calgary on Tuesday. After a period of incubation, and some jet-leg recovery, I would like to share my time with it, with you.
This is the only sculpture I worked on continuously through-out my apprenticeship with Lane, at first for a few hours a day, a couple times a week. It grew into a daily endeavour by the last week of my stay at the compound. I don’t believe Lane intended me to finish the work, and I don’t think this was my initial intention. It stood there, foreboding, as a place to hone my skills and busy work between other projects. It grew into an obsession, and a place for mindful meditation. It presented a place to enter a ‘Flow-state’ in the repetition of cutting similar shapes over and over again. When I began to really let-go, the work guided me, it took me and line for a walk, which extended well beyond the parameters of its rectangular composition.
This work was initially created for the Socrates Sculpture Park on Long Island, and part of the Emerging Artist Fellowship in 2006. Lane created the sculpture on the grounds of the park, and after some dealings with the Mob in the procurement of the dumpster, which she was initially oblivious to, she brought together this “unlikely and surprising combination of urban industrial waste containers and upscale domestic perimeter fencing” (https://socratessculpturepark.org/artist/cal-lane/). As Cal and I chatted about the acquiring of this object she mentioned, about the mobster who donated the dumpster, “he would say things like: I can’t even go to peoples homes anymore to collect my money”. This initially caught her off guard, until she began to mention him in conversations with friends and colleagues native to New York who knew exactly who and what he was. His only stipulation was that he could stop by occasionally
and ‘check-up’ on her, make sure everything was ‘ok’. This seemed a little strange to Cal, but she agreed, and said he would stop by from time to time, hold up in his car, and just watch her cut away revealing the ornate fencing of ‘Gated Community’.
My job was too open up this ornate fencing pattern she has carved away from the object. The diamond spiked tips of the fence pickets, followed by a circle and semi-circle give the fence this upper class ornate quality a gated community fence would have. Cal based her imagery on fences from the gated communities which surrounded the area. The pattern rides around the walls of the dumpster, like a gentle roller coaster meant for small children. Undulating between dips and peaks surrounding the rectangular composition of the dumpster. It begs you to walk around it through the flow excentuated by its repetition and immensely reductive sculptural process.
The work no longer demands the space it inhabits, it is as though it now fits into the space it has become a part of. The ability to peer through it into the natural environs of the landscape it inhabits opens the sculpture up to a new dimension. The tree that has begun to sprout out of the centre of the dumpster helps construct this narrative. The pile of wood chips on the western local of the dumpster starts to build a dialogue with this notion of something new and organic growing out of the dumpster, and refuse related to this tree, wood chips, pilled outside of the dumpster drive this odd anecdote.
While none of this is intentional, and Lane intends on removing the tree, and spreading the wood chip around her vast property, my head space wanders to these arbitrary narratives and conversations embedded in the process of working in an environment outside of the studio. While cutting away the western side of the dumpster it felt as though I was trapped between a Damian Ortega sculpture and Lane work, a nice place to settle in and labour away.
The very thin lines the plasma cutter produced, while the tip and electrode are still in prime shape, reminded me of the line work of Tibetan thangka painters. “The ‘perfect brush’ is the most important tool and each artist would construct their own brush from a few selected hairs; these hairs being of wild cat, marmot, or sable. This aids in creating long continuous curved lines, one has to reload their brush many times and it requires a great deal of skill to pick up on this line exactly where you left off” (Tibetan Thangka Painting: Beyond Notions of the Ego Embedded in Style, Faubert, p. 10). I can relate to this process in my own ‘intuitive line’ work used to compose my figurative works; but while working on the dumpster this notion of precision was very clear . When cutting the very long sections of fencing with spans ranging from 24”-36”,
my process was to cut them with two lines, constructing two L shapes which interconnected to build the rectangle. Often times I would have to stop and readjust my positioning to keep the torch at a 90 degree angle to the steel, picking up on this line exactly where I left off proved to be more than a little challenging. In this case there is a 1/4” blind spot to where your line will begin. This is the construction of the tip with a 1/64” hole in the centre of it. Once you begin there is no turning back, you have cut where you are. Add to this the shower of sparks which temporarily shoot back at you while you blast the initial hole into the steel, this adds another level of intensity to the process the Tibetan thangka painters endured and mastered. So here, I turned to their process embedded in mindfulness of breath meditation. “All of this (picking back up on your line, and long arcing steady line flow) requires long periods of breath retention and steady exhalation. This process of breathing is directly related to a process of meditation focused on mindfulness meditations and the First Foundation of mindfulness of breath. In this we have direct focus on the present moment or the ‘here and nowness’ which these works inspire” (Ibid, p. 10). All of this allowed me to enter a ‘Flow State’ while labouring on Lane’s work, and I believe this is what made the process this work so addictive. I also found a 'Flow State' while cutting away her doily patterns as well, but, in a different manner. The dumpster was a slow more attuned and concentrated process; while the doily cutting, because of the smaller scale of the work and the more organic patterns being cut, lead to a quick and energetic flow. This is something I try to expound in my own work. Making these connections not only confirmed why I aligned myself to work under Lane’s tutelage, but it further constructed my experience with her work, which was transcendent. This is the powerful sentiment of Lane’s work, it goes beyond in its ability to transcend: space, time (via my acclimated flow state while working on it), and the creation of something truly sublime. I am overwhelmed with gratitude and honoured to have had the experience of working for Cal Lane. This engagement with her and her work is something that will continue to inspire and influence my art practice forever.
Thank you Cal.
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