non-Specific Objects
(objects in-between)

Enter a small art exhibition space where white, floodlit walls appear to be waiting for something to happen. As your eyes adjust to the perceived emptiness of the room, small lines and slight shadows emerge here and there near the wall’s surfaces. These indistinct visual cues coalesce into sparse, wall-mounted objects where nothing seemed to be moments before.

The gallery space at hand is activated with sculptural objects, but it’s not obvious what these objects are. They have a familiar materiality and shape, but also display attributes that are somewhat unnamable, visually discordant—non-specific. The shapes, wiry and spare in form, are somewhat geometric but skewed as to render them almost abstract. Some seem to pierce the wall’s plane where cast shadows appear to project shadows of their own. There is an ambiguity that engages the viewer. The sculptural meaning of the objects lies between logic and imagination, between what appears knowable (a protruding wire, a cast shadow) and that which is clearly imagined (a shadow casting a shadow).

In the room, scientific and natural law (what we’ve come to expect) appear infused or contaminated by the human subjectivity of the artist’s hand. This blending of authority and illusion brings into question the physicality of these objects. What are we seeing when we look at these sculptures? What are we seeing when we ‘see’ in our everyday lives?

At eye level, attached to a wall’s surface, there’s a half-bowl-shaped object with its opening facing upwards. On closer inspection, it’s apparent that a very thin line (a piece of wire) delineates the bowl’s rim. The thread-like wire forms a half circle by protruding from the wall at one side of the bowl, bending around to the front, where it’s twist-tied to another piece of wire that arcs back into the wall on the opposite side. This wire ‘rim’ is actually the only three-dimensional aspect of this sculpture. The viewer, upon closer scrutiny, discovers that the rounded mass of the bowl—inferable from the shading attached—is actually a flat, half-circle of (the palest gray) pigment, painted directly onto the wall. Though fully aware of the artifice, the viewer again experiences the bowl’s three-dimensional mass. A flickering of perception occurs between what is ‘known’ and what is ‘seen’. The sculptural situation that this object occasions is perceived as both clearly defined and as somewhat unnamable.

Nearby, on an adjacent wall, a blackened spike (actually a piece of burnt coat hanger wire) protrudes at a sharp angle from the wall’s plane. Another wire/spike, similar to the first in length and thickness, but covered with white paint, also protrudes from the wall. The last 6 inches of this painted wire are bent at a right angle, forming an ‘L’ shape. The wires—one white, one black—pirouette away from the wall, casting narrow shadows in the form of an outlined triangle. A second triangle—this one solid—is painted directly onto the wall next to the former. Because the pale gray paint emulates the shade and hue of the cast shadow, this painted triangle appears (even if only for a moment) as an actual shadow, but as a shadow with a questionable source—an impossible shadow.

This object, with its elemental components—wire, wall, cast shadow, and pigment—offers a sculptural instance that exceeds the sum of its discernable parts. This object is what it is; it looks like itself, but the sculptural meaning extends beyond appearances. The visual cues about objecthood that we’ve come to trust over our lifetime are combined here with the unqualified (the non-specific), focusing one’s attention on a sense of the in-between. Sculptural meaning, in this work, hovers somewhere between the rules of science and the transient subjectivity of human consciousness. A visual puzzle is presented.

In general, when we ‘see,’ we are not purposefully pointing our eyes and logically deciding what is there, even though that is what our eyes would have us think. The act of looking is no more manageable than are feelings of desire, and what we ‘see’ is at least as subjective as is the act of falling in love. The simple materials that comprise these sculptures, placed in this particular manner, offer a puzzle to be solved by the viewer. The work both triggers and rewards scrutiny as one seeks sculptural resolution. As the viewer unpacks the puzzle, the object becomes dissected into its disparate parts, only to be reconstructed into something unnamable—all the result of looking. What we bring—how we see—is an important ingredient of this work. By making (and changing) decisions about what is actually there, the viewer consciously conspires with the object in a process of constructing phenomena.

Shadow offers important cues in interpreting what is before us. The result of interruptions to the flow of visible light, shadow is elemental to understanding the three-dimensionality of our world. In our perceptual world, however, shadow is generally not consciously attended to. When observing a sphere, we simply conjure ‘sphere-like’; direction of available light and attached shadows are not scrutinized unless seemingly out of place. The sculptures I’ve made simply are what they are, but the visual cues planted for deciphering them have been carefully positioned so that the resulting conclusions become uncertain. By questioning whether we should trust our eyes, the discordant aspects of these objects call attention to how we are seeing.

Because of the seemingly misplaced shadows, questions arise: is the shadow cast from a three-dimensional object, or is it simply pigment on the wall? Is there a ‘reason’ for a discordant aspect of the object or can it be discarded as unnecessary to gleaning what is actually ‘there’? As the viewer ponders a trail of sculptural cues, the object’s meaning is derived. However, because of a resulting irresolution, the viewer’s gaze will often return to the beginning for another look. This recursive beholding (this looking and re-looking) can be meditative, somewhat like gazing at a sunset or staring into a fire.

Using line, shadow, and mass, these sculptures simply and elegantly disclose their means of construction. Everything used to attain ‘there-ness’ in these sculptures is clearly visible. These shapes, while being both object-installation and elegant curiosity, also contain the possibility of being something more, something beyond what we are used to seeing, something maybe a little ‘other-dimensional’.

Utilizing humble means, these works invite the viewer to ponder his/her role in the construction of phenomena. That is to say, using small amounts of wire and paint, these works not only solicit our visible engagement, but also draw attention to the basics of how all objects appear as they do. The intimate sculptural moments provided by these objects encourage the viewer to observe and question relationships between material and form—to notice the viewer’s collaboration in how all visual meaning occurs.

The work of John Cage consistently pushes at the edge of how we internally formulate our world. From visual and aural chance operations, to temporal manipulation and silence, Cage’s works reveal and investigate the structures we use in discerning reality. He has stated, “In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four minutes. If it’s still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers it’s not boring at all.” This statement is an example of how our ‘looking’ is an integral (and therefore contingent) part of the larger perceptual process. What we see, what we perceive at any given moment is highly dependent on the many factors that enter into how we look. What one expects to see often determines what is seen. When visually observing either the world around us or a particular object, what we bring to the process is very important.

As I conceived of and produced these sculptures, I thought very closely about my relationships with time, space and objecthood. I noticed how cues coming from the objects give both information and misinformation about their dimensions and relationships to the wall and room. I also found myself observing objects both holistically (all at once) and linearly (one part at a time). A glance at the bowl-like sculpture from a fixed viewing position allows for a narrow, possibly deceptive interpretation of what is there. By observing this piece over time and allowing for multiple angles and distances, a more complex conclusion can be reached; a conclusion that allows for ambiguities and therefore possibilities.

The concepts in Cage’s work impel us to question our perceptions of sensory data by illuminating a multitude of phenomenological possibilities. All phenomena—whether visual, aural, or tactile—are evaluated and understood using a wide array of both socially learned and hard-wired informational filters. We hear, we feel, we understand what we’ve been taught to conclude and what we’re physically capable of concluding. To get around these automatic responses—to understand or ‘see’ phenomena and situations in new ways—a little encouragement can be useful.

An especially powerful example of an invitation to re-evaluate or to ‘re-see’ phenomena that we’ve previously taken for granted is offered in a musical composition by Cage, called Organ2/ASLSP. The title came from his direction to perform the piece “as slow as possible.” The John Cage Foundation has adapted Organ2/ASLSP to be played so slowly, that when performed in its entirety, it will take 639 years. With the help of lead weights placed on an organ’s keyboard, each note or combination of notes are playing continuously until the next note or notes begin. Because of the impossible length of the musical composition, we can hear only one very thin slice. This seemingly endless droning of a few notes might seem unlike music we are used to hearing, and in fact might not seem like music at all. From the unusual aural vantage point of an expanded musical moment, we’re offered sonic relationships that would previously have gone unnoticed.

When performed at normal speeds, Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP sounds like familiar classical music, a phenomena readily categorized by our learned responses. The method of temporally expanding its structure reveals the powerful effect that time has on phenomena. It is an awakening experience to project or infer beyond our learned and hard-wired responses.

Inviting the listener to experience music in extraordinary ways is significant to my sculptural endeavors. The simple line and form of my recent work allows the object, in many ways, to be only proposed, not defined or limited. Similar to the way Organ2/ASLSP gives only a slice of the composition, the nominal means utilized in my sculptures have minimized the cues revealing what the object is, and where it resides in relation to our body and to the wall’s plane. In an instance of less allowing for more, this stripping away of information opens up the field of perceptual possibilities. When our perceptions are offered an opportunity to call into question what is before us, the phenomenological possibilities seem—even if only for a fleeting moment—deliciously unbounded.

For instance, in my work a line of wire (sometimes cylindrical, sometimes thread-like) protrudes from the wall’s surface, constructing negative spaces and casting shadows. Pale gray pigment added to the plane of the wall, suggests the illusion and artifice of mass and so introduces object uncertainty. The wall’s plane is penetrated by a shadow that appears to cast a shadow. Negative spaces formed by the wire’s shape seem to contain scrim-like attributes. Similar to Organ2/ASLSP, new ways of understanding phenomena are offered—a different quintessence is suggested. The conclusions normally reached regarding our physical world become only one very narrow interpretation.

Some aspects of my new sculptures refer to what is missing—using absence as if it were a solid. Fred Sandback’s yarn sculptures have served as a touchstone on this score and are a vivid example of emptiness becoming something-ness. Using very little in the way of material, a line of yarn, Sandback’s sculptures construct large areas of negative space within the clean, unfettered, white-walled galleries where they are exhibited. Here again, the viewer is allowed to notice one’s own role in the construction of phenomena. The empty areas defined by the yarn, although made solely of air, begin to appear as a thin, veil-like solid. The sense of a thin mass existing inside the area defined by the string induces viewers to both avoid stepping through the empty spaces, and in some cases, step through just to physically experience the existing nothingness. Fred Sandback’s yarn sculptures are an accurate example of how our perceptual machinery is disposed to construct mass from a sculptural suggestion.

The further one looks into the essence of a representation—the act of beholding as opposed to normal everyday perceiving—the more complex that something becomes. When we look at an object, we become changed by the experience of what we have seen. In a fraction of a second we then, without even blinking, look again—only to be even further changed. My recent sculptures are laced with cues that push at the periphery of what we know. This invitation to look beyond the usual allows the perceiver to construct greater totalities such as the previously unknown musical relationships resonating from Cage’s temporally expanded Organ2/ASLSP.

Given the opportunity in my recent works, the viewer extrapolates, projects, and extends the phenomenological boundaries of what is present. Psychologists call this kind of projection "boundary extension." Helene Intraub, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Delaware, explains: "One way to think about boundary extension is literally to look out a window. In order to make sense of what you see—part of a building, branches of a tree, a small rectangle of lawn—your mind extends your vision to what amounts to a more complete view, instead of a series of truncated objects."

The installations of James Turrell, especially his darkened-room light sculptures, are an example of our observations extending physical phenomena. Because his sculptures furnish the viewer very little firm, verifiable information, it becomes clear that conclusions drawn about what is being seen often come as raw visual data from one’s own perceptual experience or ‘bottom-up’ rather than ‘top-down’ as confirmable visual fact. Because of the ambiguity between what is actually there, and what is discerned to be there, the observer is encouraged to increase his/her awareness of the physical and cognitive processes involved in seeing. In this way the sculpture becomes a conscious collaboration between the viewer and the phenomena. This relationship between our senses and the world around us is being played out all the time and James Turrell’s light sculptures increase awareness of this interplay.

A term often used to describe this collaboration between representation and imagination is the French word, trompe l’oeil, meaning trick-of-the-eye. Some representational trompe l’oeil can be reduced to a photograph or a drawing while still offering an effective illusion. The drawings of MC Escher are a case in point. The artwork at issue here, however, demands a ‘real time’ viewing. The full effect of these works happens only when the viewer dwells on them. It is not surprising that Turrell’s light sculptures are almost impossible to accurately document. A photograph can be taken but will only record a very thin slice of the overall meaning and effect. In the same manner, the viewer-constructed solidity within Fred Sandback’s negative spaces fail to appear in photographs. My work not only demands viewer presence, but viewer duration, mobility and complicity as well. Scale, distance, wall, wire, and pigment are as much a part of my work as is the real-time perception machinery of the viewer.

My desire to produce work involving cognitive presence has been coalescing for some time. When I look at the evolution of my artwork stretching back a few years, I notice an elemental motif running throughout. In hindsight it is apparent that I have been looking all along at object-ness as a phenomenological experience. A process of paring down and stripping away has continually brought me closer to what has interested me most—the confounding mystery and allure of objecthood.

The experience of graduate school seems to have sped up and focused this process and has brought me to a precise observational point vis-à-vis the small sculptural suggestions or cues that give an object existence. By focusing the object’s meaning on the very cues signifying its objecthood, the work offers itself more precisely as an experience of objecthood. The occurrence of looking at one of my sculptures could be likened to what James Turrell has described as the deep and powerful loneliness of having no horizon when piloting airplanes during inclement weather. Standing in a room, looking at an object and not being sure of its objecthood is similar to flying an airplane, where one is unsure of orientation—up, down, left and right. By bringing attention to perceptual cues, my recent work focuses the viewer on a slightly horizon-less sculptural landscape—a sculptural situation that is propositional and therefore open to interpretation.

In generating the work of this writing I recently spent countless hours staring at the wire-based sculptures I produced in previous semesters, searching for an element or a loose thread that would lead me to a deeper object truth. I was hoping to discover more precisely what draws me to objects and shapes in general and to my older work in particular. I wondered if any specific element could be singled out and distilled, allowing for new sculpture that is stripped away, minimal and more to the point. In staring at these older works I have begun to notice small intersections where the foundational cues indicating objectness collide with the ephemeral. I have discovered aspects of physicality where the visually concrete (burnt coat hanger wire) mingle and clash with negative and shadow-formed spaces.

The manipulation of shadow is a significant factor in my new work. Shadow is the single most important element in revealing the three-dimensionality of sculptural objects. Shadow is the visual signifier of depth and mass. Shadow gives the viewer indications of where objects are in space in relation to the wall, the room, and the viewer’s body. Whether the shadow is produced by ambient or spot lighting, or evoked with pigment on the wall, the result is the same—cues are given that suggest mass, material, and object-location.

Studies into visual perception have shown that we don’t pay attention to shadow in particular, only what shadow signifies. We generally have no need to acknowledge where available light is coming from or at what angle it falls and we’re not compelled to consciously evaluate location and density of the resulting shadows. However, the particular ways I’ve manipulated and called attention to shadow in my recent sculptures occasions the viewer to notice shadow as a privileged aspect of an object’s physical form. In these sculptures, shadow is a recognized player in the hierarchy of sculptural meaning making.

Shadow can be understood as a hole in the flux of photon energy reflecting from the surfaces around us. Shadow is the trace of an object, an extension of objectness. By seeing shadow as a ‘something’ rather than an absence, shadow can be thought of as an object in and of itself. In my recent works, I position both actual and representational shadows in ways that treat them as objects. These shadows act not only as a signifier of hidden-from-the-light, but also as another aspect of the sculptural terrain. In accomplishing this sleight of perception, the sculptural meaning of objectness becomes pliable, and in so doing exposes the ubiquity of our constructed realities.

At birth we have no understanding of what shadow signifies. Most of shadow’s meaning is learned and is therefore part of a social construct. An adult, blind since birth and suddenly attaining sight, would not visually be able to match what is seen with the memory of touch. Cubes and spheres would simply appear as planes of dark and light. In one famous case documented by William Molyneux back in the 17th century, a young man born blind and received cataract surgery was unable to visually discern between his own dog and cat.

But everybody’s visual apparatus, blind or not, is hard-wired in a way that expects light to come from overhead. Almost all animals, from snakes to sharks, and from mice to lions, have lightened undersides to subvert the expected shadow of light falling from above, thus giving them an ecological and evolutionary advantage. In my sculptures I have allowed shadows to fall in ways that give cues to what is physically present. A couple of wires protruding from the wall are arranged to form a three-dimensional abstract shape, while the shadow they cast is of a clean geometric square. This duality of cause and effect contradicts the expected. I have also jammed the meaning of sculptural reality by placing shadows counter-intuitively. A solid shadow painted on the wall portrays a non-existent mesh or a three dimensional depth that is not ‘there’. This ‘jamming’ forces the encoded (the learned understanding of shadowing) to grind gears with the ephemeral (the subjectivity of human consciousness).

These works are part of a sustained investigation into the social, psychological, and physical world around us. These sculptures can be thought of as structures. I see our world as made up of many different kinds of structures and all of these structures are continuous—they are formed by and of each other. There are social structures, psychological structures, as well as physical structures, and all are interrelated and interdependent. For example, to view these recent works in the space of the gallery we exit the structure of the city streets and its defining grid. We enter a building structure that is an art school representing a social structure. We pass through hallway structures and cross a threshold into a room structure. We have been experiencing all of this through a complex psychological structure, and by looking at these works of wire and paint, we mentally reference and draw upon that recently experienced continuum of structures. My recent sculptures are not only bound up with this complexity of continuity but also call attention to it.

Part of this structural complexity is the object’s materiality. What things are comprised of informs their ‘objectness’. My recent sculptures use things (wire) to produce form. Slight bends and wrinkles left behind from prior use or from manufacture, make visible the ‘was-something’ in the material, and the resulting palimpsest brings the ‘objectness’ of the wire greater importance. The irregularities of the sculptural line call attention to the fact that these aren’t just marks on the wall—they are objects. Even the straightest protruding spike of wire, when looked at closely, becomes a cylindrical thing.

Another important element of objectness in my sculptures is their relationship to their immediate surroundings. In these works, the wires and the wall in which they are embedded have fused together, sometimes calling attention to facets of the local architecture, sometimes inviting the mind’s eye to include huge spaces as part of the sculpture. In my studio, there is a portion of the sheet rock wall that cantilevers overhead towards the room’s center. The angles and object-like shadowing in the sculptures installed focus consideration on this cantilevered portion of the room’s architecture. By bringing attention to shadows, it becomes clear that it is shadow which cues us into knowing that the cantilevered wall is leaning over us rather than away.

My recent sculptures are visually and aesthetically anchored in the white-walled confines of my studio and the art gallery space. The controlled lighting and smooth, nearly featureless architecture of the ‘white cube’ is conducive to the spare and simple form of these works. The ‘white cube,’ instead of limiting experience, enhances and clarifies. Here it is not a filtered version of the world, but a site-specific installation inviting the viewer’s learned, hard-wired, and boundary-extended visual memory to flourish. The moments and instances of sculptural meaning showcased by these works are projected onto our greater world. Much the same way that Turrell and Sandback, among many others, have utilized the gallery space, the ‘white cube’ is drafted here as just one more element in the construction of meaning.

Because these objects are of such simple means, the viewer, when observing them, becomes hypersensitive to every scratch and bump—every cue delineating phenomena—on the immediate walls and floor. These sculptures draw attention to every nuanced detail of their construction and placement so that even an inadvertent scuff mark becomes an object of scrutiny and suggested meaning. This focus on what previously had gone unnoticed is an exciting reaction. The ideas presented here, taken as a whole, beg the question: what would we see if we could peer around the veil of our physical, societal, and habitual ways of looking? How might we then conceive of or visualize space, form, and object differently?

The sculptural pieces at issue here are what they are: wall, wire, pigment, and empty space. They are phenomena waiting to be experienced. I hope that producing these objects and placing them as I have at this time and location will offer the viewer a peek at something that had previously gone unnoticed. These objects are not images of things; they are actual things, however much they flirt with representation. They appear as what they are—objects and paint—while also representing aspects of the ephemeral, aspects that allow and invite our own subjectivity to construct and imagine.

Influential Sources

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Cage, John. I have nothing to say and I am saying it [video recording], Music Project for Television, WNET/New York and Lola Films in association with RM Arts

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Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Reaktion Books Ltd.
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