Standard
Deviation: McCormick Foundation Museum Sculpture
Chicago IL
From the Foundation: "The museum is dedicated to ideals McCormick
held dear: America's freedoms - the First Amendment rights in particular
- and the civic responsibilities that accompany those freedoms."
Freedoms of speech and of the press constitute an acceptance of
many unique voices and expressions. Like symbolic fragments of meaningful
places embedded in the walls of The Tribune Tower, the signature
work for the museum should be an object made of many individual
and unique fragments that become evocative of these voices and expressions.
The work is conceived externally as a rigid, confining framecase,
a visual counterpoint to the planned plastic interiority of the
McCormick Museum. The framecase contains a series of 360 individually
cast “fragments.” Internally, these fragments contain
a geometric dataset of voids. This interior dataset undergoes a
process of “standard deviation” from rigidity (geometric
suppression) to plasticity (geometric expression). Deviation from
this standard also happens vertically, in color, form, and density.
This allows the expressive interiority to methodically become more
pronounced and eventually consume the platonic “counterpoint;”
a freeing of the interior from its exterior.
The
proposed piece is five feet square and seventeen feet tall, taking
advantage of its position in a double height space and its ability
to be viewed and understood throughout both levels of the museum.
Digital Fabrication of the individual fragments would take place
through mold production, with each fragmenthand producedfrom translucent
resin. We estimate that each of these finished fragments would range
from five to eight pounds in weight, depending on their individual
density. |
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