CCA Confidential

I have been killing myself on my class projects over the last week. Everyday has been a 12 or 14 hour work day. I am exhausted. The two art history papers, each 5 pages long, weren’t that bad. But I have been spending 6 to 12 hours a day in the 3D studio building my favorite piece of this term, a box I call “Looking Lantern I.”

Keep in mind I have never worked in a woodshop in my life. This box was constructed completely by hand. The side panels are joined together with miter cut. One of these pannels opens along the length, so I had to set hinges into the miter, which was very difficult.

The top ends are butt jointed and reinforced with copper rod, which I cut and set by hand. I think this was one of most difficult parts. I miss aligned the end cap with the midsection several times. So I had to fill the whole with dowel and glue and start over again. The box is smooth. The color comes for mixing my own proportions of different leather dyes, and finishing the wood with wax sealant.

Inside are six horizontal slats perfectly cut into the four sizes. Five of the slats hold Plexiglases on which I have placed five parts of a three-dimensional collage I created on transparency paper. The sixth slat holds a semi-transparent sheet to prevent he view from seeing the mirror at the base which reflects light in through an opening on the bottom side. This opening is also covered with a semi-transparent sheet.

The the box can be opened and new slides added, a feature I worked very hard on so that I could continue to build new environments.

The critique for this project went very well. There were no negative comments, though I know of a few imperfections in my construction. Here are a few things people said:

• Inventive, like a weird science project.
• Unique, unlike any of the other work in the class
• Interactive, people want to come up and look into it

You can see larger photos and pictures looking through the oculus at my flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ccaconfidential/. Unfortunately the three-dimensional effect of the collage is lost in photographs.