I am drawn to questions about how an object can exist on camera and to the possibilities that come from playing with scale. Recently, I have been working with the paper fortune teller, or chatterbox, as a sculptural form; I am interested in whether its extraction from context and its interaction with the performer can free it from the burden of its cultural associations. I wonder whether such gestures open up new possibilities and new ways of seeing the object, or whether a chatterbox will always remain a chatterbox. I work with a variety of materials, and I have cast the chatterbox in aluminum and bronze to give it a solidity it does not naturally possess. I have also experimented with different kinds of cameras to explore various aspects of its materiality. Here is a snipper from an experiment with the SANDIN image processor, where I attempted to work with the form stripped of any narrative structure.
I have also made more playful works, such as these ones captured on Super 8, taking the aluminum cast fortune teller as well as the giant paper chatterbox into the fields, and found something compelling in the way metal appears on motion picture film.
And here are some metallic sculptures I’ve made of fortune tellers
