Colorado Art Ranch

I have recently been accepted as a resident artist at the Colorado Art Ranch, a nonprofit nomadic artist and writer's residency and Artposium.

www.coloradoartranch.org

The program travels to two Colorado towns each year and adopts themes that reflect the area's heritage, natural resources, topography and people.

The program is composed of two parts: a two-day Artposium open to the public and a one-month residency for literary and visual artists.

I am excited to have this opportunity and to work in an area of great beauty. I will be investigating the sculptural capabilities of 90 stainless steel Volant skis that were headed for the landfill. A conglomerate of plastic, mild steel, wood core and stainless top-sheet, the skis aren't easily recyclable, hence art provides a useful alternative. The original manufacturing plant was located in Wheatfield CO, and I may pass through this area on my trip west.



One thought was to create work inspired by Kenneth Snelson, on the basis that his primary material is shiny stainless steel pipes, held in sculptural arrangements by a patented structural concept called tensegrity.

http://www.kennethsnelson.net/

I've been interested in creating sculpture that draws from the work of established artists, but utilizes sustainable sources of material. Imagine a Richard Serra sculpture using the curvateous prows of decommissioned navy vessels, or a Christo inspired structure wrapped in 7 old hot air balloons. The materials exist, and I am on a quest to increase my chances of acquiring and transforming this type of material (off-spec, decommissioned, excess inventory, landfill bound, scrap, flashing, drop pieces, manufacturing defects and other useful byproducts of the industrial process) into large-scale sculpture.

Materials! Sculpture proposal!

On an impromptu trip to Stratton VT, I acquired 46 Volant skis from a ski shop in need of extra storage space. These were helpful while visiting Stone Quarry Hill Art Park to propose a collaborative sculpture utilizing 60 decommissioned lamp poles measuring 25 feet tall. Previous installations (http://lamppoles.blogspot.com) utilized massive ground stakes to hold a series of arches static, however the ground is stone at Stone Quarry, hence we have settled on a tripod configuration, eliminating ground stakes or cable for support.

Sculpture Barn Installation

After fabricating 80 custom hardware units from laser-cut scrap, another iteration of lamp poles is born.



In an attempt to work efficiently, a process was established to standardize the hardware placement for incremental adjustments of the pole position. The only problem was the only way to verify the calculations was to construct the sculpture. The result: a tad bit off. This created a new problem which evolved into the eventual third spiral shape.