Nathan Sawaya

Tejo Remy

I chose last sunday (yesterday) as the period of 24 hours I would spend with my 2x4. Having worked at a hardware store all summer (doing load-outs and stocking the lumber yard), being in close contact with a 2x4 was nothing new to me. Nevertheless, I did feel a little weird bringing it to the dining hall at lunch. I stowed it under the table, ate, and then headed for my dorm room to get some reading done. I spent the rest of my day there (I had upwards of 90 pages to read by the end of the day), but from time to time I would glance up at my 2x4 and try to come up with some sort of inspiration. As I mentioned in class today, a pivotal moment in my experience came while I was trying to clean my room. I had put everything in its correct spot except for several pairs of shoes (which I haven't found a spot for yet), and my 2x4. This was when the idea of a functional sculpture started to play a large part in my thinking. In the end I decided that although a shoe rack would have been a good idea, there is simply no room for it in my dorm room. Plus, shoe racks aren't particularly famous for acting as vessels for artistic creativity.
A few more hours passed, and between periods of reading, I came up with several ideas having to do with chopping the 2x4 into extremely thin segments. However, these concepts weren't directly inspired by any occurrences in the world outside my own brain. My final bit of inspiration came when I was turning the lights out and getting ready to go to bed. An ongoing problem in my room has been that I have no source of mood lighting in my room. Although a 2x4 obviously doesn't emit light, I believe that there are many ways it can be combined with a light source in a way that is both artistic and functional. So, I drew a final sketch of a design involving the use of circular saws and drills. Then I went to bed, thus concluding the conscious portion of my 24 hours with a 2x4.

Response to Mike Meyers' Presentation

As I mentioned in class, the single attribute of Mike Meyers’ work that impressed me most was the mathematical precision visible in most, if not all of his work. Everything from the thread structure to the wooden “bells” consisted of polygons that interlocked and constituted more complex shapes in not two, but three dimesions. As somebody who spent a large amount of time building a small house over the summer, I understand that even to fit strictly rectangular shapes together at right angles can be a colossal challenge when one must measure and cut each side of each shape precisely and then physically bind them to one another in a durable fashion. So for me, seeing sculptures that consisted of non-rectangular quadrilaterals joined at both acute and obtuse angles was quite a trip.

Although I had trouble seeing a deeper meaning in many of the sculptures that Mike Meyers showed us, it was reassuring and somewhat interesting to witness how obsessed he had become with certain, seemingly random compositions and themes (like the wooden bells). The amount of devotion he showed to such particular shapes and forms made me believe that although I couldn’t see it, the work held some sort of intellectual or emotional importance to its creator.

Henry Moore

Chihuly