The Wood Workers Journey-an exhibition in Hawai’i

Last year I received an invitation to an exhibition at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center to create a piece for an exhibition titled The Wood Workers Journey: Concept to Creation (exhibition dates January 4-February 29, 2020). There were no restrictions on the type of work or size, only that the primary material must be wood and that the process of creation needed to be documented. The invited artists were a stellar cast from both the Hawaiian Islands and the US mainland, and it sounded like a great exhibition-so I accepted.

Many thanks to curator Neida Bangerter and her staff for including me in this wonderful exhibition and for the incredible execution of the concept. The didactic panels are beautiful! In the spirit of the exhibition, I have prepared this blog post to talk about how the work came together. What you make of it is up to you.

I started with an idea to create a device to divine who to vote for in the upcoming presidential election based on advice from several carved talking heads, but that eventually morphed into this piece which focuses on the rhetoric surrounding the subject of immigration, migrants, and the border wall.

About Boxes

While I have made my share of strictly functional boxes over my career, I have been more interested in the box as something to contain an idea. I guess you could call that “thinking inside the box.” The basic construction of this piece is what woodworkers call a “bandsawn box” - a simple way to make a box out of a single piece of solid wood by sawing it apart and reassembling the pieces.

POTUS Portrait

As the President reminds us, he is very busy running the country and golfing, so I had to resort to press photos to reproduce his likeness. From these I made patterns to rough out his face from a block of basswood. Luckily, the wood was close enough to his facial tones, maybe a bit less orange, to leave its natural color. LED lighting might help. Roll over the images for captions and click to enlarge.

Press images were sized with key points (eyes, nose, tongue) indicated.

Basswood block with face section removed.

Face roughed out and ready to begin carving

The other parts of the basswood block have been glued together with the face standing above the rest of the box. The face will be hollowed out like a mask to make room for the mechanism.

Details painted with gesso, milk paint, and acrylics.

Filling in details with the help of surgical telescopes.

Border wall imagery is drawn from various concrete and steel border wall and fence proposals.

View inside showing mechanism for extending and retracting tongue and Arduino controls.

About the Mechanism

The mechanism is very much a handmade cut, fit, improvise affair. A proximity sensor disguised as a lapel pin actuates the tongue when a viewer comes close, the tongue then extends, stays out for a period of time and then retracts and the President times himself out for a few minutes and then waits for someone to come close. I wish to thank the amazing artist/musician Robbie Lynn Hunsinger for helping me with setting up and programming the Arduino controls. Check out her web site to see how she uses electronics in her performances.

About the Border Wall

I read everything I could find about the border wall proposals and the prototypes and selected two different wall types for this piece. The first, a “Steel Slat Barrier” was tweeted by the President. There are a number of versions of this rusted concrete-filled steel barrier, but the lethal-looking pointy “finials” came from the President’s version.

A number of border wall designs proposed by contractors were concrete cast to resemble stone. Since the President promised a “beautiful” wall, I took some liberties and dressed it up a bit. This is one I used as a source: