Pedestal-Ryan Kedrowski-Souba

Original Plan...

Hot Knife (when it was still working)

Me, Being confident that I could finish this in time...

Cruising Along...

Shortly before the first incident...

Chemical exposure from melted foam/burning glue...

Then the hot knife broke...

Exhausted & desperate I scrape this together...

And All That Could Have Been...

Ryan Kedrowski-Souba

2014

"I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear --

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley 

I accidentally explored failure with this piece.  I have a hard time admitting defeat, I always have.  There is more than one way to talk about this piece... there's it's current state-2/3 of a small Hamburglar's body that I am still working on.  There's the pile of scrap I brought in with a doctor's note resting on it and there's a hypothetical pedestal that I foolishly didn't think of until it was too late.

I will start by discussing the piece it will become at some point this summer.

I had set out to create a companion piece to my casted Happy Meal I created earlier this semester.  It was to become a life-sized statue of The Hamburglar resting a McDonald's tray containing my casted Happy Meal on his back.  The sculpture was to be all white, much like the happy meal items and I was shaping it to reference the statue of Atlas.  Since some people may not know of this mythological tale I'll tell a very very brief version:  long ago the Titans fought the Olympians and lost.  Atlas, who had sided with the Titans was punished by being forced to hold a celestial sphere on his shoulders for eternity.  Seeing as how I'm obsessed with esoterica, I not only know a great deal about Atlas's plight, but also the mythology of McDonaldland of which The Hamburglar is the main antagonist.  The fact that the McDonald's corporation integrated an entire imaginary world to better sell Happy Meals to children is one of the most amazingly American things to have ever happened.  I will finish this sculpture and title it "The Weight of the World" which is a double entendre.

The second iteration of this piece is the large pile of cans and boxes holding a doctor's note.  I am not pleased with this as an object.  I regret not coming up with a backup plan earlier as it was becoming increasingly obvious that I had severely underestimated the time table.  I was using a heat knife to slice up the styrofoam and it was moving along quite well until I succumbed to a dizzy spell/fainting spell from the fumes produced in the process.  Luckily, the heat knife only stays heated if you hold the button in and when I was unconscious I hadn't held the button in... otherwise this could have been even more dangerous than it already seemed to be, especially at 4am.  Luckily my girlfriend got me in to see a doctor as soon as possible and aside from burning eyes, lungs and throat and a terrible headache I came out of it alright.  When I recovered, I was determined to finish only to find that the heat knife stopped working after a few minutes.  It was getting quite late again and I had to come up with something.  I decided to make a shrine to my failure to deliver on what I arrogantly promised myself I would finish.  The shrine I made was a reflection on my flimsiness and insecurity in the wake of a tremendously crushing semester.  My lifestyle was spinning out of control and my attempt to push out in front of it was ill-conceived and doomed for failure.  Several people warned me that I shouldn't have set the bar so high for myself when I'm already under too much pressure and that I barely have any time to work on something so ambitious... and I think deep-down I knew it too but couldn't admit it.  So I ended up with something scraped together in a very haphazard way that I regret.  I did think that the doctor's note was funny, but I guess it was an inside joke to some degree and my mental state at the time made it seem funnier to me than it perhaps was to anyone else.  In a lot of ways this was an unintentional performance about failure and it's only made worse by comparison when I consider the third version...

The third way to look at this is far more intelligent and so simple I couldn't have thought of it in my panicked state.  Basically, I should have brought in the half formed structure of the pedestal that I have finished... then stab the doctor's note into the flat top-most surface of it using the broken hot knife.  I realized it shortly after I got to the school.  I mean, I knew that the haphazard object I brought in was challenging both aesthetically and semiotically... but I could have salvaged a failed sculpture that functioned much better had I kept my wits about me after the knife broke.  (It also would have been cathartic to cause some hard to this object that had caused me so much grief).  Maybe that's all I need to say... the conception was a reflection of my pride and determination... the shaky heap was a reflection of my bemused resignation and malaise and the afterthought that I regret not bringing in instead is a reflection of my anger towards myself for my lack of foresight.