John Early

Yesterday, the conceptual artist John Early visited the class. He described a number of magical-in-an-everyday-sort-of-way projects, such as his eclipse photo series, where various objects are tossed into the sky--lawn chair, bicycle helmet--and then photographed as they eclipsed the sun. (We were told it took lots of tossing and lots of shutter clicks to get the images.) He talked a bit about being influenced by post-studio artists, who make and compile their work anyplace they can, including the living room, the office, the street.

In one particular project, Early described turning his life-long habit of collecting car parts into installations where he remade those cars, or at least parts of them, in the gallery, suspending the pieces according to their positions in the original vehicles. The results look similar to the way incomplete dinosaur fossils are articulated in a museum, prefiguring the (hopeful) possibility, thousands of years hence, when people unearth these machines and assemble them for display for in their public spaces and galleries. Click here to see an image.