“TIMEGOESON/SOMETHINGSNEVERCHANGE”
2021
Pouring medium, acrylic paint, plexiglass, canned food, glitter, plastic, foil, rice, clay, paper pulp, etc.
A mixed-media installation with paint peels, exploding foods, sculptures, and found objects.
…
PROCESS
Animation Experiments + Building an Idea for a “Film”
Over the summer I had an idea of making a film about a wife who cries and chops vegetables. In the beginning of fall, I started drawing, piecing things together, and doing animation experiments with cyanotypes, charcoal, paint on glass, and pencil. I was trying to figure out a story with this wife and this cat and Jim Cramer a bunch of other domestic images of a home. However, the more experiments I did, the more I realized that the idea for this film didn’t hold the same burning interest for me. Intuitively, I was more drawn to the materials I was experimenting with. Somehow this led me to the next step: paint peels.
2. Paint Peels (2D/3D)
I’d started doing paint peels about a year earlier, last winter in my “VOGUE” project. I was still interested in the technique, as I had also envisioned an installation using paint peels of my childhood bedroom. With that subconsciously in the back of my mind, I returned to using pouring medium and glitter and acrylic paint to create images of the home. I embedded shredded plastic, rice, glitter, and photos of my car and my house printed out from Google images. I piped acrylic paint out of ziploc bags to “draw” and create patterns. In my sketches, I had the idea that I wanted to make double-sided paint peels. With one image on the front and another on the back, I was interested in seeing how the semi-transparent, translucent quality of the pouring medium would allow light through and the silhouettes and layered, intersecting images it would create. I enjoyed using cheap, household materials and images of my actual home, all covered with plastic and glitter. It was simultaneously translucent and reflective/iridescent. I had a lot of freedom creating these images. By nature of the pouring medium, I could layer wet paint into wet to create swirling, dribbling effects, or wait for each layer to dry before applying the next to accumulate new layers, images, and drawings. I would start multiple at a time, one layer at a time, and adding layers with materials, colors, and paints spontaneously to create many iterations of the same core image. I had so much fun! I was also still interested in grids as a way of visual organization for these chaotic fragments, like a tension between chaos and structure that I feel so much when I’m at home. It’s also an image that I think about a lot in relation to the suburban place I grew up in. Using images of my actual car and home and rice from my pantry and the pink colors of my childhood bedroom (that’s remained unchanged to his day) were an interesting juxtaposition to the hypersimplified, cartoonish, crude drawings and the plasticky materials that feel like they’re timeless and resist decay. Almost like trying to preserve something that’ll inevitably decay…
For context, the place I grew up in, Foster City, California, was built on a landfill in the 1960s. Shimmering white homes and restaurants and a beautiful lagoon tinted with blue dye has been constructed over it. Thus, I’ve always been interested in the surfaces of things, and how aesthetically things look, and what actually lies at the “core” of things. In other words, things inside of things… which feels like a very physical and bodily experience, but also a deeper wonderment at what actually is on the inside of things, and whether that thing is real. The search for a real and “authentic” thing is a never-ending one, and as I worked with layers of translucent material I realized that depending on which side you looked at the peels from, you couldn’t actually tell what was internal and what was external, and what was real and what was fake.
There was a car inside of car, living room inside of living room, rice inside of things, dozens of little houses. I was trying to process my feelings about home, and trying to capture an accurate image of it. There was no singular image that captured home, but rather a mass of fragments that created a feeling… of something undoubtedly familiar, but also totally strange and dettached.
I made animation of the paint peels, underlit with a lightbox on a homemade glass multiplane. They pan across one another like landscapes traveling at different speeds, flipping and turning and zooming in and out, like a deep examination of the relationship between the internal and external worlds.
I also made a stopmotion animation where I constructed a set tilted at 45 degrees, with paint peels attached underneath a piece of plexiglass, clay sculpted over the plexi, and a lighting system. There’s a cartoonish moon character that I animated by elevating on a simple rig made of foamcore and other random things, and it cries these little white houses.
Lastly, I also made animations with photos taken inside my house. Each photos is taken every several steps, to feel like zooming into and out of spaces. I tried transitioning these into paint peel animations, like a sort of endless interior world, with layers and dimensions caught between the real/imaginary. I began to think that maybe I would still make a film after all, just more abstract and materially focused…
3. 3D Paint Peels/ Food Sculptures
So I did not make a film. I started making sculptures. My previous experiments lead me to thinking about the pouring medium on a 2D/3D level, like almost a fleshy, organic, skin-like material that could encase things inside. I got an idea to buy some preserved foods. I went to the grocery store and bought some canned anchovies, olives, and tuna. I had no idea what I was doing or whether it would work, so I just started pouring and drawing over the objects, embedding pieces of foil and paper pulp. It took at least 3 days to dry completely, then I slowly and carefully peeled off the layers of paint and materials. The result was a skin-like casing, with remnants of the products’ labels stuck inside, too. It was super interesting. I tried under-lighting it to see how it would look. Depending on the layers and what was embedded, ti had varying levels of translucency.
Soon I was buying spam, jams, snacks, cereals, canned vegetables, and more. I bought anything that looked attractive or familiar or caught my eye, really. It was an overwhelming amount of stuff, but I just kept getting more. I ended up with over $200 worth of food. Embedding foil, plastic, paper pulp, clay, rice, wax, and layering with acrylic and pouring medium and creating drawings with the piping technique. I also tried making plaster molds for the first time, and trying to make jar-shaped casts from those with wax and glitter. Clay and hot glue created an interesting, fleshy mix. I was in full-throttle, making dozens of experiments as each piece was its own little experiment with color and material, and choosing to recreate parts of the original thing, treating the form and design of each food product like a “source image,” and manipulating, exaggerating, and exploding it. It felt like I was cooking and sculpting and drawing at the same time. I had so much fun!!! The process was like using real life, imagination, and moments where they intersect to create exploding exaggerations and iterations!
At this point, I wasn’t just creating “skins” of objects. I started leaving objects encased in pours, dripping and exploding and sometimes slightly opened. It was like a reverse process of accumulation, starting from the outside —> in and imagining what’s inside.
4. Mini-Fridge Experiments
Next, I needed something to make a “container” for my objects, almost like a pantry. I started looking for inspiration at Home Depot. I was attracted to the different patterns, shelves, and building materials at the store. I tried making concrete casts of the crown molding and tiles to create a deconstructed house for my installation. My original idea was to make a transparent house using plastic vinyl and hanging things inside it to create a “core,” but I found the fragmented/deconstructed idea more interesting. With fragments of physical traces of a house, plus food and imagined elements, it felt like a fossil of a house or a memory of a house being excavated/dug up/transformed, like remnants of a time capsule.
I created my first plexiglass sculpture of a “fridge,” made out of plexiglass, metal, and found wood, with baking soda/superglue epoxy. The dimensions are about 24”x18”x12”. Hand-cut and assembled, I could “sculpt” the object with more freedom and creativity rather than plan and laser-cut a specific design. The drawers and compartments are nested in a nonsensical way, defying structural logic and gravity. Interior becomes exterior as food wrapper material (foil) and house material (wood) are conflated into one object. The internal compartments protrude, almost like they are in motion/exploding. With the objects inside it, it looks like a mystery box. I tried different kinds of LED lights, strings lights, and light panels behind the box, and small flashlights to illuminate the objects from underneath.
5. Light and Hanging with Paint Peels
I did a bunch of experiments with hanging up the paint peels in space and lighting. It was far more interesting installing and viewing the paint peels in space. Stacking and layering them in space instead of a 2D orientation changed my perspective and sense of gravity and space. Their materiality as 2D pieces seemed much more delicate, fragile, beautiful, dramatic, and visceral. In the dark with various forms of lighting, it looks almost like blood and flesh, with things trapped inside them. I appreciated them a lot more as objects rather than as images in an animation.
6. Mockup Installation
Somehow, I ended up creating an installation. This was my first attempt, where I hung up the paint peels, displayed food sculptures, and the box with crafted objects and foods inside. It seemed like the best way to bring together all the fragments, without trying to turn it into a cohesive whole like you do with film that’s at the expense of materiality.
7. Big Fridge
After making the mini fridge, I made a bigger one. The dimensions are about 60”x48”x24”. Still hand-cut and assembled, it was a laborious process. The fridge was constructed in pretty much the same way as the smaller one, with similar dimensions but about 4X larger, using plexiglass, found wood, foil, metal, and L-brackets for stability. I used epoxy to fill in gaps and sealed it over with baking soda and super glue. The cabinets and drawers are still divided and nested in a sort of sculptural way, rather than a logical one. The thing was so goddamn heavy to carry later on.
8. More Objects
Since the big fridge was as big as a person and I wanted it to be filled to the point of exploding with stuff, I had to make a lot more paint-pour objects and go into “mass-production-mode,” except each thing was a unique and handcrafted experiment. I also started making “splattered” objects, with chunks of what look like Poptarts, Froot Loops, mac-and-cheese, and other foods made out of clay, foil, plaster, paint, etc. At this point, many of the sculptures had actual cans of food inside them and others, like food items that look like twizzlers, cheez-its, poptarts, etc. were sculpted entirely from different, non-food materials.
9. Sound
In the last few weeks, I started working on sound. I experimented with recording many different sounds of containers and objects opening and closing and creaking, using objects I found from my house. I also tried layering shimmering, tinkling sounds to create a sporadic, fragmented sound that augmented the shiny, glittery quality of the materials. I embedded the speakers with opening/closing sounds inside food can sculptures planted inside the fridge, and also speakers outside, hidden behind the walls, that played the shimmering sounds. The result was the illusion of the objects inside becoming activated and brought to life, the materials seemingly on the verge of exploding and oozing and the plexiglass creaking like it’s about to break.
10. Final Installation
In December, after an exhausting process moving all the heavy sculptures and objects, and hanging, assembling, lighting, and installing with the help of 3 other people, it was finally done. The final installation was the fridge in the center, filled with objects, with paint peels hanging above, and surrounded by splattered foods and household decorations. It was pretty large-scale, and filled a large studio with high ceilings. Walls with wooden windows are installed around it, and 3 different sources of light illuminate the fridge and the paint peels. Light and the sounds of opening, closing, and creaking activate the objects, making them shimmer and feel like they are oozing and about to explode. The shimmering sound gently echoes around the room in an eerie, unsettling way.
I’d never made an installation before, so this was a completely new experience for me. Working in space was really fun, and allowed me to use so many mixed-media fragments to create an immersive experience. It feels the closest to real life, as it combines painting, sculpture, drawing, sound, found objects, and moving images. Being inside the space makes me feel caught between worlds/dimensions/temporalities, as I take in all different images: the classic foods that seem to be from another age, the images of my current car and house, and the shiny, glittery, colorful crystallized materials that seem like they’re from the future. One professor told me that the fridge feels like an alien, and I agree- it does feel like there is some strange force living somewhere inside all of this chaos. Taking the form of objects rather than a moving image became important to the overall meaning, connecting its physical materiality to ideas of cultural materiality, excess, and capitalism. The process of creating this project made me think about our cultural and material obsession with the past, with familiarity and how trying to recreate it through collective memories transforms the present and reinvents our futures.
Overall, I completed this project in the span of 3 months. It’s crazy to think how much work I did so quickly, with so many different mediums and techniques and experiments. It was truly, at every stage, an experiment that I went through in my process, week after week. The project transformed many times and took so many different directions, I never could’ve predicted what it would become until the very end. I am really happy and amazed at how it turned out.