Quarantine scene from ET

proposal thesis summer 2015

http://www.creativityandcognition.com/research/practice-based-research/differences-between-practice-based-and-practice-led-research/

MFA in Visual Arts Thesis Proposal

Name

Russell Maycumber

Biography

Born in Jacksonville Florida and grew up in several different locations including England, the Virgin Islands, New Orleans and Los Angeles. I started college in Los Angeles and picked up work as toy sculptor and crewed on movie sets. After moving around from Texas to NYC to Atlanta and the mountains of North Carolina I returned to North East Florida with my wife to raise our son and complete my BFA. I am currently living and teaching wood shop skills to fine art students at Flagler College in St. Augustine Florida. I am also actively producing and exhibiting my art work both regionally and in various locations including New York, Miami and Seattle Washington.

Artist Statement

I am currently interested in the anxiety of not being able to know ourselves.

Project Discipline      This project is a sculptural installation of  drawings on cut wood forms.

 Project Title –larval subjects

Short Description This work is informed by the assertion that the urge to understand others is as strong as the urge to understand self. In this research asymmetry and symmetry is explored and expressed as speculative and mirrored forms through sculptural objects. How the asymmetry and symmetry of speculative forms affects understanding. How symmetry can imply harmony even under speculative conditions. How symmetry can mislead self identity into a state marked by the uncanny. How speculative forms with recognizable elements can engage our sense of novelty and lead to a state of emersion.

Context      

Originally this work developed from a reaction to consumerist culture. I found I was participating and reacting to that culture by mimicking its broadcast forms.  Radio, TV, print media and distributed products all greatly inspired my earlier content. Drawing was the most immediate way for me to express interaction with my surroundings. As a product of continual dislocation I became the broadcast element to those experiences metaphorically putting me on the other side of the consumerist curtain. If my work had a historical aesthetic context, it would best be described as speculative realism.  I say realism, as the work addresses a concern with the authenticity of my experiences and speculative as a suspension of judgment based on expected reified outcomes. Henri Bergson’s conceptualization of the cone of duration and Deleuze’s synthesizing the manifold of sensibility into a single moment also referred to as the moment of apprehension (Deleuze and the Three Syntheses of Time

 By Keith W. Faulkner) greatly inform the tenor and cognitive framework of the pieces.

Approach

The use of articulated joints on grotesque figures speaks to the illusive if not impossible moment of apprehension and its potential to understand itself.

Impact

I am greatly attracted to the sensation of immersion. This is an aspect I seek in the products I consume and in the experiences I seek out. When I produce objects and people respond to them with that same sense of immersion, of losing themselves and dissolving if only for a moment into a common mental and physical space I feel I have achieved some sort of stasis, maybe not a balance but a mutual acceptance of being. (Psychological therapy moment :again a need for the dislocated kid to integrate to new environments and social situations?)Often this is achieved in my work by a combination of virtuosity in my line work and an overwhelming amount of detail, some of the detail is recognizable and some of it foreign but always with a consistent attention to performance. I think it is this combination that people find easy to get “lost” in.

Audiences/Communities  

Because of the popular roots in my imagery there is an appeal to audiences that might not have the privilege of a higher education or the distinct advantage of being indoctrinated into the secret society that the art world has become culturally. A lot of my influences take cues from traditionally blue collar and visionary/outsider communities. I feel this assists in transcending some of the hegemonic tendencies that are natural between organizations built around rapidly evolving ideals and that my work may introduce a bit of both of these worlds to each other. I am just your average everyday revolutionary peace maker with a soft beatnik two step and a big synthetic brush.

Venues

Because of the culturally esoteric nature of the work, it would most likely fit into the hegemonic-ly insular world of a white wall gallery/wine and cheese theatre. Yes (un)fortunately, I have a lot of friends in that realm.

Catalyst / Pivotal Moment  

A pivotal moment for me was the realization of how the language of realism was being used in contemporary art practices. “Realism” became a metaphor for inexplicable occurrences and the foundation for visual non verbal communication. Being able to put a language to this experience greatly improved my ability to frame my creative practice. The investigation and research acumen gained from executing this project allowed me to see the historical importance of western styles of ontological orientation and gave me additional tools for processing my experiences. By exercising these tools creatively and applying these processes to my work I feel I can navigate my ideas with some degree of facility that I did not have before being exposed to this material.

Salt Run 3

notes on Salt Run 3. Low Tide,Danger Rock. Ran aground twice. Soft sand noise on the dagger board, then beth pulled it up with a little effort. The second run aground was a little more of a jolt as the daggerboard buried itself and the hull continued to struggle forward-a cracking sound could be heard from the plastic coating that housed the foam body of the hull. The anxiety of continual vigilance against unseen submerged hazards added to the breathtaking 6 p.m. sun and desolation of the virgin shoreline high with very old sand dunes.

Salt Run 2

Salt Run 2

Thoosa project

Bill Hill spring2015

The editing aspect of this video was intended to emphasize the “realism” of the act of  a sunset sail.  I wanted my choices to reflect a relationship between real time sound and action and less an entertaining narrative. I find that there were so many variables that were beyond my control. I also discovered how irritating that is to me as a creator. My intent for the next journey is to find ways of documenting the experience that do not require video imaging. If anything the video was useful notetaking in the recollection of the event. This was helpful for me because the actual events tend to be overwhelming and the documentation helps me to review what I may have missed to the anxiety of the moment. The most engaging aspects of the effort were in exploring what was revealed by the low tide. As an old colonial town, St. Augustine reveals a lot of history when its shoreline waters recede. I also found the strange inter-social politics between the boaters and the people who were fishing on the pier. At one point in the video you can hear a fisherman yell “thanks dude” to the boater that ran over his line. On a self absorbed note, I responded very positively to the way my drawings on the sail looked. I enjoyed seeing them set against the sky and how they must have been a slight spectacle to the other boaters. In retrospect I think I was engaged with the effect of my mimetic representation of clouds on the sail and how they would obscure and complement the actual clouds when looking up at the sail for course corrections. As I was cutting and melting the plastic onto the sail I found myself projecting to the moment I would be sailing. The moments that the design were created would be brought back to my mind as I was sailing. I am not sure what to make of that sensation. Lately I have been exploring the Greek idea of the quadrivium. The primary aspects of this ancient way of conceptualizing our experience included four parts. “Arithmetic, then, studies quantities as such, music the relations between quantities, geometry magnitude at rest, spherics [astronomy] magnitude inherently moving.”[1] I speculate if this sensation of remembering and projecting isn’t a lot like sailing as it is a magnitude, my awareness, in motion or according to the quadrivium theory, sailing is like astrology, a body in motion, my own world propelled through space.

Prior to the salt run 2 sail expedition I wrote this-

Initially the idea was to make my own sail and to launch the boat into a publicly held retention pond or some other utilitarian body of water. The intent was to experiment with different levels of sovereignty within a given politic regarding the other and self. As the project evolved a shift occurred in the project’s focus. I became more interested in the experimental quality of the plastics formally as elements of design and the sensational novelty of sailing itself. This may or may not have to do with the project coinciding with my investigations into the work of Friedrich Schiller and his theory on The Play Drive during this developmental stage. I understand my initial idea as reflecting the desires of what I perceive the current state of the “Art World” to condone. It would have been a good prank: cheeky and antiestablishment. Maybe I just didn’t have the testicular wherewithal to sneak into a potentially illegal trespassing situation. When I think on the initial idea of sailing a dingy on a little lake, the idea becomes about banality and the absurd.  When I think about designing my own sail and voyaging into an area I have never been, I think about romantic notions of escaping banality. At which point are we acting out of sheer curiosity and not out of escapism? When do we act in self-preservation and when do we eject ourselves into unknowns because we are mesmerized by the potential of elsewhere?

Some how this whole into the unknown idea is related to the mission to the moon in 1969. Also the only time  I ever went to Disney as a kid was with my estranged biological father. Jules Verne Manifest destiny. Space Race. I keep going back to Hegel’s idea of the other as the concept of the identity of difference.

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[1] Proclus, A commentary on the first book of Euclid's Elements, xii, trans. Glenn Raymond Morrow (Princeton: Princeton University Press) 1992, pp. 29-30. ISBN 0-691-02090-6.

lost and found in the green hell

The lost city of Z

visual research on the Thoosa project.

gods and godess-(Thoosa)origins of religion tied to ventures for profit.
Asking for more-increase. Sea navigation as field of chance. Would like to make a sail out of billiard cloth or black jack table baize . The root of modern statistics in speculative undertakings. Interesting how religion and markets are tied to each other. The medici family and sponsors or donors for journeys. Lightening.The letter א Aleph symbolizes the wind,Boat names are always so auspicious.
I am also seeing an overlap with the research for R&D II Leach Spring 2015
"I am finding similarities in the visual relationships between the grotto as represented in renaissance follies and the concept of the temple curtain in Hebrew traditions. Both of these texture fields are signatures of place. The places where the other" is often encountered. I am also starting to see relationships between the material used in making the temple curtains and games of chance as in billiard and black jack table coverings. That material is called baize"

Quadrivium arithmetic was pure number, geometry was number in space, music number in time, and astronomy number in space and time. How does this relate to play as oscillation? How does play relate to navigation?

sextant-star navigation

This is the boat style I learned to sail on as a ten year old child. It was called a scorpion and competed with the SunFish model.

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Ripley's Believe it or not St. Augustine worior with Vajra-Kongōrikishi (金剛力士) or Niō (仁王) are two wrath-filled and muscular guardians of the Buddha, standing today at the entrance of many Buddhist temples all across Asia including China, Japan and Korea in the form of frightening wrestler-like statues. They are manifestations of the Bodhisattva Vajrapāṇi protector deity and the oldest and most powerful of the Mahayana pantheon. According to Japanese tradition, they travelled with the historical Buddha to protect him and there are references to this in the Theravada Scriptures as well as the Ambatta Sutta. Within the generally pacifist tradition of Buddhism, stories of Niō guardians like Kongōrikishi justified the use of physical force to protect cherished values and beliefs against evil. 

Cherished values and belief -how we seek solitude to protect those beliefs or we resort to aggression. The act of isolation is very apparent when we make an island of ourselves. Boats become a way to solitude.

-Vajra is a Sanskrit word meaning both thunderbolt and diamond.^[1] Additionally, it is a weapon which is used as a ritual object to symbolize both the properties of a diamond (indestructibility) and a thunderbolt (irresistible force).

double crown formations-vadra -tridents ,royalty, neptune,

plastic bags
petroleum 

first car

star-ship

cross roads

speculative vessel Galctic Pot Healer-Philip K. Dick-The story concerns a man who thanklessly heals pots in a totalitarian future Earth, only to be summoned by a godlike alien known as Glimmung, who has recruited him as part of a multispecies specialist team sent to "Plowman's Planet" (or Sirius Five) for a mystical quest, which is to raise the sunken cathedral of Heldscalla from a surreal alien ocean.

I am very interested in the spaces that are opened up psychologically by speculative fiction creative works.

Vela