The Eternal Now
Various dimensions. Approx. 6’ high, 8’ long, x 6’ wide.Various dimensions. Approx. 6’ high, 8’ long, x 6’ wide.
This is a hybrid make ready assemblage that has no permanent shape. It is fashioned with non-traditional art materials. A 4-foot by 8-foot sheet of 2-inch-thick XPS board was alternately cut by the artists with a jigsaw to create random shapes. From this pile of polystyrene fragments we alternately picked cut shapes and either painted or paper-wrapped each to create a unique skin for each piece.
Jerome works primarily as a collage artist. He cuts images from magazines and creates elaborate small-scale narrative compositions. For this project we took one of his collage pieces and scaled it up 400% and printed it as a large black-and-white poster. Jerome cut, pasted and wrapped shapes with portions of the big paper print. He hand embellished with crayon.
Eno’s shapes, were either painted directly with spray enamel or pasted with stenciled or Xeroxed paper and other found materials that could be applied to the shapes.
Artists
Because Jerome and Eno both work with paper, it was a compatible, and at the same time challenging, collaboration. We worked separately over a couple of days to wrap or paint each shape to our liking. It was a new experience for each of us to work on creating unique skins for 3D fragments cut by gestural strokes with a jigsaw. Neither of us had experience working large and on fabricating three-dimensional objects. In its first iteration, the make ready was assembled into its original rectangular shape – a complicated puzzle with some relief characteristics. “Reassembly was a bitch!” Eno added.
Pictured above, Jerome Brown (left) and Eno Laget (right) are shown standing in front of the semi-relief painting that resulted from our collaborative work. The photo was taken by Doug Cannell during the 333 Midland Annex Gallery “Big Sculpture” exhibition in 2016. Since then the puzzle pieces have been disassembled and reassembled variously as a temporary sculpture for display. There is no permanent form for this somewhat fragile experiment in shared art making. Because of how we randomly worked there was no compositional vision for the project. We were astonished by the visual coherence of the puzzle upon assembly the first time. On the fly, they fabricated a free-floating wood armature to hold in place the first iteration which presented as a wall relief.
Eno also stated that, "what you see today in the gallery was assembled into a new form for this exhibition.”