Saturday #3

With the threat of thunderstorms, this day got off to a slow start but later some people started to stream through. I was really excited to see my boss and her daughter, who had come down to the park to lend a hand. Robin and Lola did a great job help to build up the surface on the big shanty and we tossed around some ideas for the rook...which I still have to build. I installed four more shanties and the ideas for more keep rolling in. As I hit the half-way mark on the project, I'm really happy with the progress of the project so far.

Saturday No. 2

Another beautiful Michigan day for working in the park. It was great to have some awesome helpers, who did an amazing job of painting and helping me to develop ideas for the shanties. I made some progress on various structures–five in process–and installed two finished shanties today.

More Shanties on the Way!

Developing the Shanties Structures and Design

The idea of building shanties is based a little bit on memories from my childhood. My dad was a roofer so there was always an abundance of tools, nails, and scrap wood. I was always building something...tree forts, coasters, bicycle jumps...I even had a phase where I built and installed wooden crosses all over the yard. It was a boys activity to pound nails and build things with your hands and it was also a great way to engage my imagination. Building these shanties is somewhat of a reminiscence for me and the smaller scale and proportion of these structures has again triggered my imagination. I have a feeling that, in the case of this installation, each structure will take on its own personality.

One of the cool things that happened when I was looking at the site were these patterns that I found on a fallen tree up the hill. I guess they are markings from some kind of worm or insect (below left) but it got me thinking about how I would approach "camouflaging" the shanties. I started with rubbings so I could record and study the patterns more closely and see what color would do to them. It turns out that I also had to consider the degree of camouflage I would aim for as my first attempts at mimicking these patterns worked too well and the form of the structure really disappeared. As I developed the surface treatment, I settled on the scheme below on the right as a compromise between form and surface.

Working with the Site

The raw site for the shanty installation. The stump in the center was a diseased beech tree that had to be removed. The result was a large opening in the canopy of the woods the created a natural spotlight on this hillside.

Project Introduction

Camouflage Village: Persistence, Change, Sameness and Time

PROJECT DATES/TIMES: 

Saturdays from 10:00am-2:00pm, July 12-August 16, 2014

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

“Camoflage Village: Persistence, Change, Sameness and Time” is an outdoor installation for Michigan Legacy Art Park to be constructed over the summer of 2014. The inspiration for this idea has developed over the past several years as the artist has lived and traveled through northern Michigan but came into focus based on work he had been doing with the cultural architect from Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Part of Sleeping Bear Dunes is designated as the Port Oneida Rural Historic District, a collection of farms that are now until under the care of the National Park Service. For the past year, Kaz and his students from the Leelanau School have been helping to document the cultural landscape of Port Oneida. This entails picking a spot within the district, taking a GPS reading and then photographing in 360 degrees in order to map the layout of the farms and how the farms relate to each other in the landscape. Through this documentation, they are helping the Park Service in presenting visual evidence of how different ethnicities approached laying out their farms and how those farms relate to each other. This cultural interaction with the landscape is what has inspired the idea to delve into ideas of personal psyche and identifying with place.

The installation will take the form of a “shanty village” which will be camouflaged into the natural environment of the park terrain. The “shanties,” defined as small, crudely built structures will take on a variety of shapes and forms. Inspired by structures like bird houses, ice shanties, fishing shanties, wood sheds, barns and a variety of other structures readily seen through northern Michigan, these structures will serve as symbols of personal identity as that individual self-identity relates to place. In these times of growing global awareness of environmentalism, the forms of this installation will represent the struggle between the internal self and the external self.

The visual premise of this installation is to build a large number of shanty structures for installation in the wooded area you see here. The structures will be small in a reduced scale and the surfaces will be covered with drawn and painted marks that are derived from the surrounding environment and abstracted to create each structure’s camouflage.