Art Showcase: Warped

Art Showcase: Warped - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. The title of this piece is Warped, and the reason is that when I was building the first panel, it was the largest piece I had ever done and I did some others that were about 4 feet high, and they did not work, and this one as I stretched the screening across it, it pulled the panels into a warp, and I was distressed, at first, and then I really looked at that beautiful, kind of warping curve, that torque, and started to really enjoy it. And I went ahead and built the other two panels and wondered if I could hinge warped pieces and whether it would pull itself apart, or even be able to hinge it, and it turned out I could. After I hinged the piece, I then, this is sewing, sewed this piece that is inserted, and installed it. And the motive for doing this, with the piece criss-crossing through, was that I had noticed Japanese screens sometimes have people or waterfalls or animals that seem to be about to leap off this panel here and leap onto a mountain or something else here, or water flowing through or people looking back and forth at each other, and they kind of count on the fact that the frame as originally installed in Japan would be folded and it create this illusion through the real space, and I decided - I also like pop-up books - that I would install a piece in the center and violate the frame-ness of it, and see what happened. I also do not know paper engineering, or that kind of thing that 3-D books do, and I decided just to let it make its own folds, and I expected that when I folded it that this stuff would emerge when I unfolded it all crumpled up like a car that had been in an accident, sort of traumatized by the experience of being compressed, and it turned out that because of the flexibility of this and the bias of this, that they are amazingly resilient, and there was something really wonderful about the idea that they would then convey a whole separate meaning. Rather than being trumatized they bounced back and came back looking pretty much like thay had. And they kind of curl up inside of the object, and when the light is behind it you can see them curled up in there like an x-ray.