AR2: Albert Paley

     Imagine an enormous sculpture that's over three stories tall, 130 feet long, and 8 feet wide all made out of cor-ten weathered steel. How would you feel standing next to this massive sculpture? It's obvious that you would feel little, but if I told you that it depicts a variety of animals from the very large to the endangered you would realize how little man could be in this world. This sculpture is called "Animals Always" by Albert Paley, and began its life on paper. Using Scan2CAD, Paley studios were able to take their existing scanned raster sketches and patterns and convert them to a vector file making it suitable for editing in CAD programs (CADinfo, May 25, 2006). The images were ready for scaling, which allowed Paley to create a scaled version of Animals Always out of cardboard. After some tweaking the fabrication process was ready to bring this project to life in a massive scale with over 60 animals and some exotic vegetation. According to Albert Paley, it took three and a half years of designing, and eight months of fabrication to complete Animals Always (Sarah E. Lentini, Metropolitan, 2010, P. 6-9). Animals Always can be seen at the St. Louis Zoo in Missouri.

  

I believe that Animals Always is a statement about our planet. The sculpture’s Cor-Ten weathered steel give the nature of age and the reminder of extinction. In the sculpture, the animals stand with pride in their habitat as they observe the visitors upon entering the zoo. The scale of the animals and the vegetation builds up at its center, allowing the viewer to feel the intensity of nature, which speaks in its presence, and will be a constant reminder for generations.

AR1: Kirsten Hassenfeld

This amazing piece “Treen” by Kirsten Hassenfeld caught my attention after researching her work. What struck me about Treen is the weightless nature and floating concept that contradicts the properties of the materials. Hassenfeld used found glass, metal, ceramic, plastic, wood, shell, and enamel; with all these little structures combined it gives a fantasy aspect of a floating city. Upon closer view, the individual pieces look like Christmas ornaments, which gives off a festive quality when viewing the piece as a whole. Overall, Treen gives me the sense of a weightless, festive, surreal nature; for me these qualities together represent the aspect of a fantasy in a daydream.  

According to the article “First Person Artist: The Wonderful World of Kirsten Hassenfeld” by Kimberly Brooks, Kirsten hassenfeld tends to play on the gender roles on society by way of intricate curved shapes. The old fabergé eggs, and primitive sea life such as jellyfishes inspire her; this tends 

to relate to the ghostly quality, weightless nature, 

and decorative patterns in her sculptures. 

They seem to float about like a snowflake in the winter sky with an organic breath of life that keeps them afloat. 

I can relate to Hassenfeld with her concept of escape in an urban environment. I lived in Brooklyn for 23 years, and witnessed the same struggle Hassenfeld observed; she lived in a loft in downtown Brooklyn in 1999, and lived around the struggles of society in Brooklyn. Pawnshops surrounded her and lots of noise from the nearby traffic, which emanated a depressive quality. Hassenfeld wanted to challenge that intruding aspect in her own space with these free- flowing sculptures that are made out of paper, polystyrene board, acrylic, pipe cleaners, and light fixtures. In a sense, Hassenfeld transformed the troubles out side with these whimsical, playful sculptures. In reading the article, I got to understand some of the conceptual ideas Kirsten Hassenfeld portrayed in her work; the concept of creating an environment as a means for escape through a three dimensional daydream.