|
Statement I build. I build to the edge, seeking that fine line between structure and collapse. I build with wood, screws, and nails. Each piece begins with the search. I comb alleyways, dumpsters, and resale shops for abandoned building material, old furniture, and scraps of wood; the cast-offs of trade and industry or the discarded gems from remodeling projects are collected and repurposed into objects and installations. Make-do architecture—the houses built on a Tijuana landfill, the roughly mended Appalachian shanty, the Hoovervilles of old, scrap wood birdhouses, and neglected tree homes are points of reference. I interact. I am interested in various types of spaces and how my constructions interact with those spaces. Scaling steps, piercing walls, connecting floor with ceiling, and crossing voids, my installations depend on, and become a part of, the space they occupy. Like kudzu clinging to an Alabama pine tree, the work relies on the structure it occupies while it simultaneously exists as its own entity. Some projects take cues from their surroundings and through reproduction re-present the features to viewers in new configurations and situations; other pieces are wholly new architecture built through a process of play, intuition, and obsession. I map. Smaller, more discrete pieces define and occupy their own space. Conceptually and materially linked to the larger work, these pieces are obsessively built and often structurally absurd. I build along a fine line between structure and collapse, between well made and slapped together, between the cherished and the neglected, and between success and failure. These pieces are at once playful and serious, animated and motionless, familiar and curious, autonomous and dependent. -John Watson |
|||||