Review||Sophia Sobers: perceptual limits, invading environs

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a little something different for you, today – a consideration of someone else’s work. (View the artist is question’s work at sophiasobers.net)

The immediately apparent issues considered in Sophia Sober’s work are biomorphic patterning and structure in relation to viewer proximity, a focus that transports us to a different place. Project such as At Night and Re-Formed Biospheres have a quality of a constructed environment which is reminiscent of the hanging fruit of a nightmare forest; the presence of “hanging” as a central element in so much of her work (Enclosure, What Remains, Mutation A-34) creates a belief that somewhere, there are complete biomes of these synthetic growths and the trees and caverns from which the grow, and that Sobers simply makes expeditions to harvest samples from time to time, and merely claims them as her own construction as she wishes to keep their origin as her  own little secret, a realm into which she may slip on her own with no outside interruption. Perhaps her reticence to take to her harvesting fields is to our own benefit; would we contaminate her environment and kill it off, or would we carry spores back into our world on our clothing and end up destroying our own world? Sophia recently commented that over time, Moving Column has not worked as well as it used to and needs to be retired. Her diction missed the mark; moving column is a living thing (though mechanical) that is dying; one does not retire such an object, one buries it.

“Enclosure” is just one of the scenes that will draw you into a foreign world.

This brings to mind the second aspect of Sober’s work, the underlying gnosis that has taken longer for me to stumble onto. In a few projects (What Remains, Moving Column, Sensing Responding), she has created systems that respond/react/adjust in a graspable range, but the limits of that range are different for each project. Her work sometimes changes in a timescale that would require more time invested than most visitors to an art show can/would spend. This is a damn shame, as the change is satisfying more on the order of seasons than of firework, which is what our short-term driven society demands. This, however, is perhaps the latent strength of the exploration. The work is uniquely suited to a public space which people will experience daily, such as a transit station or office lobby.

metal and water react in a dramatic way, but not always in a timescale that humans inhabit. to the eyes of a slowed being, the rusting of a can is as frightening as a fire is to us.

The question of ranges of perception is raised. From whence and to whence is her catalog progressing? Will she explore slower and slower changes, or faster, more immediate ones? To my mind, for this artist to continue growing, her work must encompass a variety of extremes in timescales. Going back to my original thought of an alien environment that Sobers seems to be harvesting, there is the difference between the flowers which open and close within a day, a falling fruit, the change of the leaves, and the rotting of the trunk. At the risk of our environment, I’m hoping that the invasion continues. There’s a beauty of life and death in the work that is strangely grim, feminine, and contradictingly delicate and violent. Your ability to appreciate the terror and joy of change will be directly related to the calibration of your perception of limits.

http://sophiasobers.net/dreams-2012/

soaked

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IMG_0228I worked in the riverbed underneath the cliffs I usually stack on at the watchung reservation today. the little island I picked was near enough to land that I could jump back and forth without getting my boots wet, but I was presented with a problem during the  process. let me explain: invariably, the first step of any stack is to create a base, a level starting point from which your structure can grow. this takes much longer than any other step. below is the result of a half hour’s work: IMG_0193clearly, not a lot got done. here is another half hour’s work:
IMG_0196I’ve more than doubled the height of this thing, but in the grand scheme of things, this is not a very good speed to be working at. regardless, it’s necessary; without a well-planned base (especially with the brittle stone I’m working with here, not much better than compressed clay), later elements added are very likely to magnify some tiny imbalance further down the pile and topple the whole thing. once this was done, the next part progressed similarly faster. I capped the stack with a large stone, and started another thick layer of smaller elements above that. I wanted to continue this repetition of layers of small stuff capped by large stones, but there was nothing in the area that was large enough to play a similar role to the last cap… except… one stone across the river. now, the river’s not that deep, but I wasn’t too keen on getting my legs wet. IMG_0197however, the rock on the other side of this little guy seemed too perfect to ignore and the water only seemed to come up to ankle height, so I figured I’d go for it. the rock ended up being heavier than expected, and the water was deeper than I had thought, so the end result was… IMG_0200

wet legs and soggy arms. nobody likes that. worst of all, I was worried that the stone would be too heavy, and that the internal forces of the stack wouldn’t support it properly, so I was scared to lift it on; here’s how I felt when it worked. IMG_0202

the top of this rock was too rounded to allow for much lateral growth, and the pile was getting tippy in general; I wasn’t feeling ambitious enough to spread it much further outwards. I phoned it in a little in finishing it off.

in the end, I really liked the way it looked on its little patch of dirt and gravel surrounded by the stream. I wish I had found the tenacity to build a few more, but my blood sugar was running low and I decided to call it a day. what do you folks think? more stacking in this location, or should I move up atop the bluffs again?

stacking in the snow – counterbalance

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IMG_0032

I was fairly busy and without a car over much of winter break, so I didn’t make it to the beach often. however, one day when it was snowing, a car was at my disposal, and I figured I had to get at least ONE trip into my january relaxation period.

stacking in the snow is a matter of some difficulty.

problem 1: everything was covered in snow. stacking is like putting together a 3d puzzle – as I place each stone, I become aware of new gaps that must be filled in order to do three things: create balance, interweave structure, and form space for the next layer. without the snow, I can take in my surroundings nearly unthinkingly and pick stones that will perform effortlessly; I actually let my eyes unfocus when looking for new stones and let my unconscious do the work. however, with a layer of snow, I have no idea where usable materials lie.

problem two: there was packed snow stuck to each piece I picked up, as a result of me grabbing them. I was able to scrape most of it off with a wipe of the glove, but there was often a thin layer of ice resulting from the snow melting as I touched it, then freezing as I put it down. as I continually moved the stones to position them, heat was transferred through the column, melting these little layers. an eighth of an inch of extra room is enough to make a snugly fitted, well placed element into a loose stone that no longer supports the lines of force coming from above. I suspect this problem led to four of the collapses I suffered while working.

problem three: the ground beneath my feet was slippery, and caused me to fall against the pile a few times while placing larger elements and the wood beam. this was especially an issue when trying to slide the beam forward after adding counterweights in the back. the live load applied while moving elements laterally is terrible for a drystack column, and when you add me fumbling around and skidding across the very stones that are supporting the base, collapses are bound to happen. this problem accounted for five failures.

surprisingly, none of the stones were frozen together, so that wasn’t an issue at all. the cold was somewhat annoying to me ears, but nothing else. my photos didn’t come out great because I forgot that there would be condensation on the lens, but hey – it’s not a huge deal to me.

mostly a satisfying day. I loved feeling the snow fall onto me as I worked, and the rumble of the waves over the churning stones was as beautiful as ever. I can’t wait to get back to the ocean; more and more, I understand that I feel torn living without it.

thought: driftwood and stone, splinters and crevices

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above  are the rocks and the iron studded tree trunk that I used as a tripod to take some of the photos of my previous stack. as I removed my camera from the make-shift stand, I was struck by the beauty of the stones against the texture of the wood and rusted metal. though disparate in their makeup, all of these materials have undergone a process of weathering in the mighty ocean, and this binds them together, visually. people weather, too.  few things can resist the force of water, yielding though it may seem.

my current project here at NJIT concerns repurposing an abandoned trash compacting facility; decay and entropy have been on my mind as a result. I have developed a fixation on the nature of decay as something that reveals the hidden life of things, not something that simply ruins the “perfect.” the skeleton has beauty, as does the abandoned ruin and the  yellowed page.  the processes may not always be beautiful at once, but the end product often shows a reduction to purity or a hidden truth.

here is a hole where once a woodpecker searched for a meal, now worn by the sea and transformed to a sharply textured resting place for a stone that someone thought needed a home. this opportune nestling of one material inside another struck me. somehow, this stone belonged. I wonder whether decay and change will bring me a place to nestle. this rock was once part of a larger stone; what will life whittle from the world to make a space for me? what parts of me will fragmented and smoothed over so that I will fit in the place secured for me? 

 

parallel? almost.

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I must apologize for the lack of posts for the last… couple millennia or whatever. I didn’t have a camera to take photos, so even though I’ve had a few visits to the reservation. anyway, I went home to Maine for Thanksgiving break, and managed to get out to Fort Williams before I had to drive back to Jersey. it went well, I thought.

one of the distinctive things about today was how rarely I stack by the ocean during the cold months. the surge of the waves  seems to roll differently. a strong high tide was crashing into the beach, then dragging grapefruit sized stones back down the slope, resulting in a muted roar followed by a clattering thunder of rolling rocks; after completing the stack, I spent some time lying on the on the beach and letting the sonar experience of the day wash over me. it was an experience that reaffirmed my affinity to the ocean side; I could never live in a place where I couldn’t access a beach within a half hour.

anyway, onto the stack. one of the important factors of this stack was the presence of driftwood on the beach; the winter currents pull more debris onto the shore than their summer counterparts, and there’s no one there to remove them; this results in a more littered beach. I thought that it was fitting to work them into my structure this time. because of their individual curves and the configuration of the stack at their time of addition,  from some angles they appear to be parallel and from others their intersection seems obvious. this ambiguous space between was pleasing to me.

the other aspect that interested me was the tapering within the column. the details of my structures aren’t pre-planned, beyond the basic form that springs to mind around 20 minutes into work, but somehow the growth proceeds in a manner that is “correct.” I try to listen to the voice of my materials as much as possible, and they will usually guide me to a place where I will be happy. in some ways, my art is very selfish. I like it when others enjoy it, but I do it more to satisfy something in me that wants to see structure emerge from the world around me.

now that I have my camera recharged,  I’m going to try to go out and stack in the reservation this weekend. this one trip reformed the desires lurking in me. I forgot about how seductive the change in the shadows is – rocks that are laying on the beach or in the woods are generally nestled together very flatly and don’t have much contrast. once you stack them, the gaps around and below them bring them to life through the darkened edges they receive; their three dimensionality comes to light, each shadow aggregating into a new whole. in a way, there are two stacks – the stack of rocks, and the stack of shadows.

I hope to post again soon. na razie.

goodbye, maine||two columns, one boulder

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soon enough, I’ll be driving back to New Jersey for *gulp* my last year of school. I always miss Maine most dreadfully, but the change of scene can be good, and I’m chomping at the bit to get some work done. being creative isn’t as hard when someone gives you a starting point, for me – for my architecture, I suspect it will be a matter of the site, if my rock stacks suggest any shade of the future.

I wasn’t amazingly happy with this stack, which I did as a farewell to the beach at Fort Williams, but it will do. I was very afraid the left-hand column was going to collapse as I placed the first beam crossing from the right, so I removed it and worked with the beam that links the boulder in back with the right-hand column. the columns are quite fragile if any lateral force is applied – as the constituent elements are not flat planes, there isn’t much to keep them from sliding across one another, or from spinning out as the loads redistribute down the post and contact points change. because of this, I continuously vacillated between different crossing elements and which side should be built from first.

one of the odd things about these columns is that I actually built them quite loose and small in section for the load that I ended up placing upon them.  often I build as though I am making a puzzle – each layer much be a consistent sheet of stones, edges touching across all lines. this time there were gaps everywhere, and it made for some different element choices than I would usually make. flat faces are still mostly apparent, though. I have given some thought to trying a spiraled, round column instead of a square layered one, but the only time I’ve done anything spiraled it didn’t get much height to it in relation to its width. I suppose I wasn’t building with height in mind, though, so I might need to take another look. the rocks at watchung aren’t entirely suitable for that sort of construction, but perhaps there are other stacking spots in Jersey that I am unaware of – anyone in northern New Jersey know of a place with loose stone I can visit? anyway, I will be investigating different construction methods and forms for columns later on, for sure.

I’m realizing in writing this that the biggest thing this stack has given me is a clearer idea of what I want to try next. along with thinking about different column types, I really would like to get better at corbelling and to try my hand at a true arch. this stack used just dumb trabeation to bridge the gaps between the posts and the boulder in back. sure, it’s safer, quicker, and easier, with less chance of the whole thing coming down while you place the lintels, but what’s the point of staying within my comfort zone, repeating things I know over and over? this roof does have some interesting qualities to it, but to get a true arch with a primitive groined vault going? that would be lovely, indeed. I aspire to much greater proficiency with dry stack masonry than I currently posses, and there’s no way to get it without diving in and making mistakes.

well, that’s it for both this stack and my Maine summer. I only got 10 stacks which I could photograph up, though I did complete a few others that, though there are no pictured, taught me things and soothed my spirit. I always feel a great loss when I leave my home state, which is so pleasantly rural, full of wonderful sights and smells, but duty calls, and this beauty will persist unabated until my return. within the week, I’ll probably have a post up from the Watchung Reservation – I doubt my Watchung Wall is still existent, but I’ll be mightily pleased if it is. have a good weekend, folks. good luck if you’re returning to school.

smallstack – the details of shifting forces

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I worked last night with smaller stones, contrasting with my “brute force” stacks. the relationships with smaller rocks are more difficult, as the force imparted by slight errant movements of your fingers as you place the pieces is more than enough to counteract the friction holding the rocks in place. if the rocks were flatter or rougher (as they are at the Watchung Reservation)  I would be more able work with less trepedation. the stack shown here is the fifth attempt, and I attempted three more after completeing this one – none of them held long enough to be photographed. this difficulty endears my successful work to me.

some of the photos below show before I placed the large, rounded rock on top; when this stone was placed, the entire flow of force though the stack changed. the center of gravity shifted towards the back, making many of the rocks that were previously crucial on the opposite side uneeded.

here we see spaces left once I removed the superfluous stones; the form is somehow unsettling to me. what was a uniform column now has gaps and bare spots – the interesting thing learned by removing loose stones is to see the diagram of gravity. I would love to draw a line and joint model of a stack, showing only from where to where the weight sends its force; perhaps next time I will bring a pad of paper.

I’m gonna work more with small stones in future trips. next time I plan to work with only one type of stone and do a series of small stacks, investigating what each type of rock suggests; forms will be more restricted by the morphology of the minerals. however, we all know what happens when you plan to be creative – the moment often sweeps the preconcieved ideas away and forces you to take another tack.