Return Of The Great White Prince

Return Of The Great White Prince, 2012, combine (wooden stretcher bars, plywood panel, rubber cement, glue, acrylic paint, acrylic ink, poster paper, metallic ink marker, pigment powder, iridescant bronze acrylic polymer, credit card, twine), 31 x 51 (frame), 16 x 20 (plywood panel);

This combine was created for a class project. The assignment was to change the appearance and functionality of two found objects. I found a piece of plywood board behind a dumpster, along with a discarded stretcher bars for a canvas.

I started playing with the idea of art itself (a physical object) becoming something different. Carl Andre created a minimalistic sculpture using fireplace bricks, without any alteration but rather arrangement it became Equivalent VIII.

The message of this combine became about perception, or our idea of perception as a viewer of art. The fact that we hail certain pieces of art as masterworks and others as unimportant. I found the backbone of the project in a quote from Hamlet, when Danish prince explains to Rosencrantz ” for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

I wanted to juxtapose the confusion and busyness of the wooden panel with intricate, yet simple weave of twine that “captured” the wooden panel in the frame, like art displayed in museums, like our lives caught in pattern.

The image is levitating between top and bottom.  The object of the plywood in the center becomes primary image (secondary being the artwork on the plywood). In the middle of the wooden panel is large hole through which we see the image of Hamlet on a posterized paper.

The entire piece together plays like a art within art, within art, etc.

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