Where tech and obsolescence meet
Grant Watson is a talented fabricator of sculptures, both for himself and for others. Over the past year and a half, he has created a series of sixteen dogs, now installed on storage racks at Deluge Gallery (636 Yates Street, second floor, 250-385-3327, until Dec. 9). The exhibit is titled Remnant.
The project began as a technical exploration, as Watson considered how to build sculptures with articulated joints. As he worked, Watson told me, “three of my friends bought dogs, for $2,500 apiece.” Dogs were becoming a commodity, an investment. So he picked up a couple of little dog figurines at a toy shop, and created an original “toy dog” scaled up to “life size.”
Six months later, when he went back to the store to get more, Watson found they were no longer available. He began to reflect on the changing reality of toys and play, and about then Toys ’R’ Us filed for bankruptcy. During that summer, he spent time with his nieces, and observed that the kids were consumed with digital devices. The tactile nature of play was falling by the wayside. This formed the narrative behind the dogs as he worked on them.
What impact does mediated information have on the imagination? With digital media, there are always predetermined options, but the narrative is already installed in the program. “Is that good or bad?” Watson wondered. “I can’t predict the future, but to look at the recent past, I notice we’ve all lost cursive writing.” And drawing, and drafting, and much else.
After scaling up his toy dog, Watson began the process of mould-making, so he could produce multiples. Each of the legs is cast in a three-part mould, the body from a seven-piece mould and the shoulders from five pieces. These moulds are rigid plaster, into which he pours a mixture of hydrostone, cement and pigment. Each mould weighs about 30 kilograms, and the parts were hollow cold-cast, “roto-moulded” above his head — he pours in the cement and swings the thing around. “Can you imagine me, with liquid pouring all over?” he said with a laugh.
This is mass production by human hand. It was his plan to create dogs with 270 degrees of hip rotation and further articulation at the chest and shoulders. He accomplished this by the insertion of two identical flanges in each joint. “They’re made in China, off the shelf,” the sculptor admitted. “Sixteen flanges in each dog, 256 in the show.”
Looking back, he reflected that it would have been easy to create a rubber mould and cast the dogs in fibreglass, but that wasn’t part of Watson’s plan. “Not plastic — I’m really trying to keep my shop non-toxic, and to create nontoxic objects that don’t off-gas. I’m doing it for myself, and for the environment.”
Watson specifically chose a light sienna colour to add to the castings, because he “didn’t want to reference dog colour too clearly.” The sixteen canines are just about the colour of a package of wieners. Each dog stands on a cardboard plinth in a sort of elementary display box, and each box takes its place on a wooden shelf. The gallery appears a bit like the stock room in a store. Nearby, two of the dogs are posed in different positions: One is splayed on its back like road kill, and the other has its limbs swept back like a swimming seal. Watson thinks of these as “discarded and abandoned models. They were popular for a while,” he fantasized, “and then were replaced by something else — whatever is the latest, the greatest,” he mused. “So much is left behind in the name of progress,” Watson remarked. “The fallout is huge.”
Many people asked him why he didn’t just move ahead to 3-D printing. Once an impossible dream, now small portable 3-D printers can be seen fabricating complex shapes on the countertop in local stores. “Object-making will never be the same,” Watson noted. “With the advent of photography, the concept of realism in painting changed. And then digital media changed photography. Now with 3-D printers, object-making is changing, right here and right now.”
So Watson’s special skills and possible employment are being superceded by 3-D printing. And he is putting his antiquated handmade technology to the task of imitating industrial-age mass production, which is just now being swept away by “print-on-demand.”
As he worked on his assemblyline kennel, Watson started thinking about the inherent effects, good or bad, about manipulating objects. “If you begin with a computer-drawn image and then just translate it into a 3-D printed form, there is a sort of void at the centre,” he said. “Children miss out in their playtime if they don’t have to deal with mass and volume and moisture and mess, and all those opportunities to experiment. Making stuff — that’s what it’s about,” he said, with a hint of nostalgia.
“For me, having worked in pattern-making, casting, and creating work for other artists from computer-assisted drawings, I became aware of the pending obsolescence of my previous art methods and practice, and how technological advances negate the hand-built,” Watson said. For now, he’s sticking to the hard-won skills that he has mastered over the years. “It’s a process that took so long,” he said.
It becomes clear why he has titled this exhibition “Remnant.” The remnant is the sculptor himself.