twenty eight days

The proposed project twenty eight days will be a series of highly detailed drawings of Pink Fiberglass insulation that incorporate turn-of-the-century (19th/20th) formal illustration, hard-rock culture and labour.

I plan to undertake the proposed project, twenty eight days, using a traditional drawing approach. Culminating from, but also running counter to, my prior investigations into death-metal culture I seek to create a series of drawings both formally appealing and conceptually engaging. The series shall include a set of large-format (22” x 30”) drawings and approximately twenty small-scale drawings (8” x 11”). In the larger drawings I will aim to undertake a realistic rendering of a section of Pink Fiberglass insulation at three times its actual size. This approach aims to define the apparently random patterns present in the insulation in order to create lush and fully detailed technical drawings. Through these pencil drawings I will attempt to more fully integrate the traditional drawing techniques I have learned over the years into my practice. The smaller drawings focus on extracting single details from the mass of the Pink Fiberglass insulation and enlarging the detail by 20%. For these drawings I will be referencing the style of rendering used by botanists and the medical illustrators at the turn of the last century (1870-1912), primarily in the study of flowers and muscle tissue.

On August 6th 2009 I had a hernia operation on the left side of my lower stomach that left me unable to work. It was during this time that I attempted studies for this project. The proposed title, twenty eight days is a reference to the number of workdays the British Columbia Worker Compensation Board will cover for loss of wages due to a hernia operation. I was unable to move due to my operation. When able I worked on the drawings in my apartment and this gave me the opportunity to determine the logistics of how to go about completing the drawing series.  This initial test drawing brought a number of things to my attention. Foremost was resolving the formal and technical parameters of the project.

In undertaking this project I am drawing in particular upon the atypical doodles and amateur drawings I produced in homage to and for album covers and tattoos in my teens and early twenties. These largely intuitive drawings were and still are very prevalent in punk, death-metal and hard-core sub-cultures today. It also became clear that labour itself was a considerable component to the project. The discipline of sustained observation over time required for the project seems to indicate only the beginning of the challenges that may present themselves during the execution of the project. Moreover, the level of proficiency necessary for the realistic rendering of the drawings will be a challenge throughout the project in order to maintain continuity and consistency from drawing to drawing.

Bite and Burn (2006-09), a multi-part project undertaken previously provided the impetus for initially focusing on Pink Fiberglass insulation. During the Bite and Burn project I was using Pink Fiberglass, which is employed primarily as a residential construction material to insulate and soundproof homes. Pink Fiberglass was similarly used in the Bite and Burn project, predominantly for it’s sound proofing qualities, but became an integral material in the construction of a room that ‘housed’ the primary component for the project. Pink Fiberglass was also chosen for it’s flesh-like colour and visual texture, which is evocative of exposed muscle tissue.

I subsequently relied on the aesthetic qualities of the Pink Fiberglass insulation for producing both the sculpture horde and the performance-based work entitled armoring, both components of Bite and Burn: encore. Using a close-up image of the insulation I relied on its resemblance to exposed ‘muscle’ tissue to create the design for the long-sleeve shirts that make up the visual component of horde. This design was intended to adhere to and faithfully reproduce the cultural aesthetic typical of death-metal tour-shirts produced in the 1980s and early ‘90s. In these works I was investigating the rituals, energies, sexuality, objects and aesthetics of the sub-culture of death-metal, punk and hard-core set within the context of contemporary art practices. It was at this point that I became interested in exploring directly the aesthetic similarities of the patterns within the Pink Fiberglass insulation to that of muscle tissue.

The project twenty eight days presents a potential wealth of information for my art practice and an opportunity for me to create a challenging body of work through a sustained period of focused studio labour. In this series my aim is to investigate the potential for bridging the gap between notions of skill and labour as defined by both lay- and arts-professional audiences – by extrapolating these elements from death-metal and hard-core punk sub-culture – and resituating them within a fine arts context. I am asking assistance for subsistence to help complete the project 28 days based on minimum-wage times for the number of hours it will take to complete the series. The estimated hours were compiled from the time I spent on the initial test drawing.

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