What We've Been Doing This Week

This piece started out as a collaboration of images in our heads. Jack was initially interested in clothing and light with simple gestures and Laura was thinking about light escaping from underneath a skirt like a crack of light under a door. While the ideas and execution have evolved and gone in many directions, we have come back to an aesthetical experience and the interaction of clothing with lights. We are learning how a steady artificial light affects the surfaces and interiors of clothing while dually exploring the intersection of male and female. The clothing is comprised of manufactured materials assigned to a specific gender. It relates directly to the human form and a certain quality of gestural movements created by a wire understructure that replaces the literal human.

We wanted to work together because we bring both a male and female perspective and personal aesthetic to the work. We want to find a way to pull those together so that they compliment each other. Laura has a lot of experience with dance and the physical movement of the human body while Jack has a strong knowledge of the anatomy of the body as well as light bulbs and colored light.

Below are some video clips of different things we have experimented with throughout the week. Jack is going to post our photo documentation as well.

Interaction of Fabric and Light Bulbs



We moved on to try to sculpt light into a physical body shape which led us to trying many different things including talk of vaccu-forming a body, filling it with smoke, and using that to contain the light. We also tried making a tape cast of my arm and filling that with smoke. We went back to working with light bulbs and clothing because it was an aesthetic experience we seemed to have lost when we moved on to smoke and physical forms of bodies. It wasn't the right direction.



We got more clothing from Salvation Army and we experimented with our first constructed wire form under a shirt. We looked at both colored and white lights and their interaction with interior and exterior spaces around the shirt. The way the wall ends and there is brick under it really bothered us. We want to do something more interactive between the male and female parts of our work. We are going to build an substructure that can stand on its own and intertwines the male and female forms physically in space. The light will also play out between the different colors and surfaces of the clothing.