CU 2.809 Contemporary Issues in Visual Arts
Professor Collings

Tracking Influences                    < BACK      NEXT >

 
Allan McCollum, 1987/88
Over Ten Thousand Individual Works.

To produce the Individual Works hundreds of small shapes are casually collected from peoples' homes,supermarkets, hardware stores, and sometimes from the sidewalks: bottle-caps, jar-lids, drawer-pulls, salt-shakers,flashlights, measuring spoons, cosmetics containers, yogurt cups, earrings, push-buttons, candy-molds,garden-hose connectors, paper-weights, shade-pulls, Chinese tea-cups, cat toys, pencil sharpeners, etc. From thiscollection of shapes many rubber molds are produced from which replicas of these shapes can be hand-cast inplaster in large quantities, thus creating a vocabulary of shapes which can be combined to produce new shapes,and so forth. A simple numerical system is used during the production process to insure that no two finishedIndividual Works will ever be alike. Each unique Individual Work is hand-cast in gypsum, and hand-paintedwith an enamel paint. The Individual Works are usually gathered into collections of over 10,000 per collection.

  Roxy Paine, 1997.
Floor Model.

Floor Model is a monumental assembly kit of plaster elements cast from assorted molds of blister packs for consumer products. On right: Mushroom Field (Psilocybe cubensis) is a floor sculpture of more than 2,000finely-executed hallucinogenic mushrooms.