Behind the Veil

I'm super excited about the upcoming CONJOINED IV show! Im honored to have Chet Zar and the Copro Gallery using my sculpture "Behind The Veil" for promoting the show. This prompted me in having the piece created in chrome plated BRONZE by Grant Standard at Black Hills Bronze! I met Grant at Conjoined II back in 2012 and have been itching to do something in metal with him and his talented crew.  This is my very first sculpture to be made in bronze and I can't wait to see it on the wall at the show. Below are a few shots of the bronze process.

After completing, my sculpture called "Bliss" in Monster Makers Clay, I striped down the clay to reveal the skull I placed in at the start of this project. Doing this, insured that I would have the correct registration and depth for when I merge these two pieces into one. This will be done in the near future so stay tuned!

Above is the destruction of 'Bliss" and the beginning of "Behind the Veil".

Here I am putting the finishing touches on the sculpt, it took quite a bit of time to get everything just right and if I look too close at it I'm still not 100% happy...maybe 90%?

This is a shot of the outer fiberglass jacket created to hold the silicone in place.

Here is a pristine shot of the inside of the mold when it arrived at Black Hills bronze in north Dakota and below are images of the wax process for bronze.

I love this shot of the in-process wax coating of the mold taken by Grant Standard, it looks so surreal. We are looking and a concave image by our minds automatically invert it so that it looks convex!

The wax is born from my silicone mold, to create an investment mold for metal.

This is the ceramic shell in process over the wax. I believe this is the first layer of the investment mold. Note the spews at the bottom of the piece. Those will serve as air vents and the pouring spout.

Here is the completed investment mold.  Once the wax is burned out of the mold it is ready for the HOT METAL to be poured!!!!

I love my friend Mike Biasi's comment he made on this image, " Oh the joys of standing in front of a burnout kiln near the crucible while wearing heavy protective gear. Even if its cold outside, those guys are roasting..."

Red Hot MOLD!

It's strange to see these broken mold pieces and know exactly what parts of the sculpture they came from.

Here is a first look at the metal after Grant and his crew cleaned it up a bit. She is a true beauty!

And finally here she is back from chrome plating!! WOW! I cant wait to see this in person. So Excited!!!

DONE! I'm so pleased to have had Grant Standard and his crew do this for me. They did an AMAZING job and I cannot thank them enough. I'm already planing out my next metal piece for next year!

Hive Tarot 5

This Saturday, January 4, is the opening of the fifth Tarot art show at the Hive Gallery in Los Angeles. If you happen to be in the area, please stop between 8-11:30 pm located at 729 Spring Street, LA 90014 and check it out!!

This year I was tasked through random selection with creating card XIV, Temperance. I did this in a sculptural form using assemblage and epoxy clay. What I found really interesting about this particular card was the extreme relevance to my current situation in life. This card is about balance and harmony.  For me, my balancing/harmony can be off in terms of how I live my life. Between work, family, diet, and exercise my life is a mess! This particular theme really resonated with me and reminded me of how important balancing my day to day is, and what is most important in my life. There are more meanings to this card than just balance and I hope the studied Tarot reader can spot my attempt to do this 11" x 14"x 4" sculpted card right. I'll be at the show opening night eager to discuss!

Krab Jab Studios!

I'm very pleased to to be a part of the Chamber of Wonders show at Krab Jab Studios from Dec 14-Jan 2nd. This amazing show is curated by Yvette Endrijautzki. Opening is 6:00 to 9:00 Saturday the 14th. I won't be able to attend but please check it out if you are in the Seattle area. Below is a sneak peek of some of the art with one of my little undead heads called "Beautiful Dead."

Creating Artificial Bliss

This new 23" x 18" x 5.5" sculpture, with 71 color shifting LEDs called "BLISS", will be in the upcoming Copro Nason Gallery 20 Year Anniversary Group Show, August 17th-September 7, 2013. Meet Jason and a slew of other great artists at Copro on Saturday, August 17th from 8pm-11:30pm. Below, Jason talks about the creation of the piece from start to finish.

There are those days when I get up and force myself into the action of the day. All the while my body is screaming at me, "No! Too tired!" Or, "We are in too much pain. Stop!!" Yet somehow, I put on a brave face and press on. Then I start to surround every waking moment I possibly can with little escapes from reality. Listening to the radio, audiobooks, streaming television, or playing video and card games like I'm afraid to be in that silence or the stillness of anything or anyone. Before I knew it, it had been months of constant distractions and escapism juxtaposed with endless work. This oddly starts to become routine and addictive. Even now as I write these words all I want to do is go back to watching TV, bombarding my mind with show after show, episode after episode of voyeuristic escapism. Is this freedom or is this a clever cage to keep the mind passive and distracted while the body slaves on? Almost the entire process of creating the sculpture I call, "BLISS", was created in this deranged fashion. My goal was to make something beautiful, but it cost many late nights of  planting myself in front of Netflix, or Amazon Prime while I pushed and carved the clay. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the process 75% of the time and when I look at this sculpture, I see a woman locked in that blissful TV stare. She has been in that stare for so long, that her body has been absorbed into a machine. She feels no real pain, no real pleasure, no real fear, only artificial bliss.

Now that I've blabbed on about my motivation for creating this, I'd like to talk about the actual process. I completed the clay sculpture on June 22. This was followed by my least favorite part, the mold. For this I crated silicone matrix mold consisting of a fiberglass jacket and nice Bluestar 3625 tin cure silicone. Tin cure has its drawbacks but is cheaper and less temperamental than platinum silicones. The above image is right before I took the fiberglass jacket off of the 3/8" clay lay-up over the sculpture.

This image is just after removing the jacket. Notice the 3/8" of clay still imbedded into the jacket. When I look at this image, my mind wants to tell me that that is positive relief, not negative, kinda cool. I use a thin plastic to act as my barrier between the sculpture and the clay lay-up. I then removed the clay, and carefully placed the jacket with the now 3/8" cavity back on top of the sculpture and poured the liquid silicone. In 24 Hours, the silicone sets up and I have green rubber gasket that sits nicely in the fiberglass jacket with every bit of detail I created in the clay. This process took me a week or so.

Now that the laborious molding is complete, it's casting time! The pic is of the first raw casting in a translucent resin. This is created with an A&B liquid material that once mixed, will harden in 90-12o seconds.  I don't have a rotational casting machine so, in order to get an even coat and thickness I had to hand rotate 3 batches of approximately 700 grams of material. This is where having a nice light fiberglass jackets saved Jason's back! Some people use heavy plaster.

Next I created a simple 1/4" pressed hardboard backing to hold and hide my lights and control box. I find that painting it silver gives the best reflection.

Here is a raw, step one light test. Upon seeing this, I started banging my head against the wall as to how the heck to paint it to hold the detail but not totally obscure the light.

I found my answer with silver "Rub n Buff". By coating the high points of the sculpture with paint and ignoring the crevices, I thought I might have something.

The only drawback to the Rub n Buff was the opacity. As soon as I turned on the lights, goodbye silver, hello washed-out mess. My solution was to turn the piece on its backside and again, paint the high points with latex to mask the area I wanted light to come through. Hence I can then paint in an opaque black backing so the silver would show up on the front.

Once the black backing coat was done, I removed the latex and put a clear coating of blue, catching the exposed areas. Here, you can see that and the zip ties securing the rim lighting LED strip.

Here is the final piece. Below are some shots I took while the LED rim light ran through its cycle.

Cartwheel Art

At the opening of Copro Nason's "Futurology" show I met Keith Dugas from Cartwheel Art, a hub for collecting and collecting art. Check out this great article about the show by Mr. Dugas here.

Photo by fellow artist Jenn Porreca