Overview Rendition Tunnel Flags Egg Knots Fence
Tunnel
I have done a lot of artwork about the Bush administration over the past few years. Ryan, in fact, asked me what I was going to do now that this administration is ending. Of course, I will breathe a great sigh of relief, but perhaps I will somewhat miss not having a daily supply of material to work with.
Tunnel is built around George Bush's last State of the Union address, and systematically mixes a number of metaphors: tunnels, railroad ties, coffins. One viewer jokingly renamed it, "The Darkness at the end of the Tunnel." The image of George Bush is distant, and his voice, barely audible, comes from a great depth so that you lose most of the words, and are left with the cadence.
In planning out this piece, I first constructed it in a 3-D modelling program (the animation at the left of the image above). This allowed me to visualize the overall form before ever commiting to build it. While I made some minor modification to the details during the construction phase it largely followed directly from my plans. This differs from my typical working method where I work from rough sketches and allow the materials to influence the form along the way.