Effect an Affect

Happy Fool's Day! Can't believe it's already April! Anywho, the experiments keep getting crazier and crazier. Today I woke up wanting to mix vaseline with crushed charcoal, and so I did and experimented with how it might look on plaster casts of what I refer to as gun muzzle inversions. See, I wanted to work with the idea of blindfolds and guns and a news reel documenting the treatment of soldiers in Irac made me think that I should create art that made a statement .... but, I don't know much about this war ( war on terrror? on Sadaam? on rising gas prices? ???) and I figured there are tons of people protesting as it is, so I focused my energies moreso on the blindfold itself, its relationship to eyelids, and how it requires both trust and submission. The installation of that work will be great fun, but I'll update on that next week so as not to ruin whatever type of surprise it might present for any readers out there who have yet to experience the piece. That is nut number one. The second deals with the ice cast I made of my feet and how that will drip away and leave behind no real trace of its own existence except on that which it affects. I'm thinking of melting some sort of photograph with the water that drips from the ice. The photograph so far is one I took in the train station restroom of Attigliano this weekend when Sam and I sojourned to il parco dei monstri in Bomarzo. The pic is of a clogged up drain in which a spider and some sort of flying insect have drowned. I was thinking of how humans seem to have averse effects on their environments, but how we won't be here forever: along the same line as the dinosaurs if you catch my drift. They ruled the world for millions of years and then... swoosh. They started to melt away. That piece of pie still needs some baking but like all things sculpture, it will pull together at the last minute. Hopefully. Hope'fool'y.
~Nicole