Ideas behind “Cast Shadows”:

1. The process of casting iron is a fleeting event that leaves residue in different ways. Works submitted address this phenomenon in various way.
2. Artists who utilize cast iron produce “permanent” products in iron not only as work unto itself, but also as document to the event.

3. Iron casting process is connected to a long history of metal art, industry, and human history. Cast iron artworks are in a sense living in the shadows cast by this rich past. As well, contemporary artists are casting their own shadows onto those around and into the future.

4. There is a digital relationship between the curators from Illinois and North Carolina. There is a line like a cast shadow from a sundial that goes back and forth between Denton and Akagawa, two gnomon.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Jesse Morrisey


Evolutionary Construction
Steel, kozo. 30” x 24” x 18”

Walking through the woods of my summer home in Cape Breton, Canada, it’s not difficult to find any number of discarded items, from old cars to washing machines to skeletons of mattresses. It’s almost like finding treasure—these cast-offs of human society have been here for thirty or forty years rusting, the forest has grown up around them, hiding them as it slowly consumes them. They are full of dirt and bursting with plants and animal nests, but their essence, the rusty steel frames, still remain despite many years of decay.
In Evolutionary Construction I portray a steel structure that, while it has been covered with natural fiber and has evolved into a natural form, still carries with it the essence, or residue of its former self in the rust that can be readily seen as it bleeds through the kozo paper. Human existence is fleeting, but like the rust on the paper, the evidence of our lives can be seen even after we are gone.

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)