Material Things: Sculpture and Prints

This solo exhibition includes work made between 1998 and 2014 and showcases a significant number of Coldwell's sculptures and print works

Bodies Moving in Space: Ancient Mesoamerican Human Sculpture and Embodiment

Judith Butler’s proposal that embodiment is a process of repeated citation of precedents leads us to consider the experiential effects of Mesoamerican practices of ornamenting space with images of the human body. At Late Classic Maya Copán, life-size human sculptures were attached to residences, intimate settings in which body knowledge was produced and body practices institutionalized. Moving through the space of these house compounds, persons would have been insistently presented with measures of their bodily decorum. These insights are used to consider the possible effects on people of movement around Formative period Olmec human sculptures, which are not routinely recovered in such well-defined contexts as those of the much later Maya sites

Sculplexity: Sculptures of Complexity using 3D printing

We show how to convert models of complex systems such as 2D cellular automata into a 3D printed object. Our method takes into account the limitations inherent to 3D printing processes and materials. Our approach automates the greater part of this task, bypassing the use of CAD software and the need for manual design. As a proof of concept, a physical object representing a modified forest fire model was successfully printed. Automated conversion methods similar to the ones developed here can be used to create objects for research, for demonstration and teaching, for outreach, or simply for aesthetic pleasure. As our outputs can be touched, they may be particularly useful for those with visual disabilities.Comment: Free access to article on European Physics Letter

‘And I know damned-well what he wanted!’ Deliberate Alteration and Interpretations of Intent in Several Late Sculptures by David Smith

Some years after the death of David Smith (1906–1965), Clement Greenberg, then executor of his estate, made a decision to have the white painted surface stripped from five sculptures and present them as authentic works by the artist. In removing what he considered to be a temporary primer coating that had already begun to deteriorate, Greenberg believed that he was restoring unfinished works to a state that would more accurately reflect Smith’s artistic intention, something over which he felt he could claim to have authority. Although supported in his actions by several prominent critics at the time, Greenberg was tarnished by the scandal and resigned from the estate in 1979. Raising questions about authenticity, the value of the original, the availability of the artist’s intent and who speaks for the artist after his death, a discussion on the reasons behind the original alteration and subsequent restoration of these works by the present David Smith Estate is provided. The idea that a single authentic state for Smith’s stripped sculptures can be identified is questioned, and possibility of authenticity being linked to multiple biographies of the work is suggested

Temporary Sculpture: Activating the Ordinary

Invite students to use everyday objects as art making materials. Through this lesson students will be challenged to consider how everyday objects can be re- imagined as art making materials. In this lesson students will research and discuss every day materials from the art room as materials for sculptures. Students will also consider how the ordinary spaces around them could be activated by the addition of a sculpture.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cstae_resource_early/1000/thumbnail.jp

MoSculp: Interactive Visualization of Shape and Time

We present a system that allows users to visualize complex human motion via 3D motion sculptures---a representation that conveys the 3D structure swept by a human body as it moves through space. Given an input video, our system computes the motion sculptures and provides a user interface for rendering it in different styles, including the options to insert the sculpture back into the original video, render it in a synthetic scene or physically print it. To provide this end-to-end workflow, we introduce an algorithm that estimates that human's 3D geometry over time from a set of 2D images and develop a 3D-aware image-based rendering approach that embeds the sculpture back into the scene. By automating the process, our system takes motion sculpture creation out of the realm of professional artists, and makes it applicable to a wide range of existing video material. By providing viewers with 3D information, motion sculptures reveal space-time motion information that is difficult to perceive with the naked eye, and allow viewers to interpret how different parts of the object interact over time. We validate the effectiveness of this approach with user studies, finding that our motion sculpture visualizations are significantly more informative about motion than existing stroboscopic and space-time visualization methods.Comment: UIST 2018. Project page: http://mosculp.csail.mit.edu