My first big solo exhibition titled "Not Fade Away" at Buffalo Arts Studio is closing November 9th. The center piece of this show is the interactive paper mache sculpture I created of the Buffalo Central Terminal. This blog focuses on it's construction.
The exhibition as a whole took me three weeks to set up. The first week I was focused on printing my linoleum blocks of Buffalo Architecture. The next two weeks I built the Buffalo Central Terminal sculpture. The last two days I created the illustration on the wall and hung the artwork.
Regarding the sculpture I knew I was going to make one of the BCT for a couple months prior to the show. I had made a couple models and created around 150 sketches. It wasn't until three weeks before the exhibit that I had the idea to have people walk through the sculpture. The interior was fascinating to me because there were so many possibilities for what to put inside. In the end I decided to go minimal thereby creating an anti-climactic effect. The unexpected is important in art, and to make the interior of a monumental sculpture quiet, contemplative, and intimate I thought would create enough of a variance to shake up the audience. To further contrast the exterior with the interior the video that I chose to display increased the vulnerability and sentimental aspect of the piece. Anyone can interpret the work of art themselves, the way that I see it is that the video of the young boys from the 1950's playing with their trains represent a kind of inner child of the terminal and/or a loss of innocence... Of a terminal once glorious but now having been used and abused by weather and human hands. Amid the distorted exterior and raw skeletal interior you have at it's core the terminal's vivid imagination and child-like wonder that gave it creation in the first place... In other words deep within the shell of the building exists a soft innocent core that has survived decades of abuse.
Photos of the exhibition...
From my sketchbook and models...
