Brit Bunkley: Sheep Jet Head
Artist(s):
Title:
- Sheep Jet Head
Exhibition:
Medium:
- Rapid prototype sculpture, 2D Lambda print, 3D animation
Size:
- 40" square, an 8" x 10" x 10' sculpture, and a 20" flat LCD video screen
Category:
Artist Statement:
Sheep Jet Head is a series of interrelated artworks created with 3D software that incorporates a displacement map of an iconic jet plane on a 3D model of a sheep within a rural landscape. In these three works, an element of the same 3D files is output in different media in this case as a 2D print, a 3D print (LOM rapid prototype), and a component of a video composited with actual footage. For me, the same digital entities (manifested in different forms) provide interesting examples of the ontological questions:
What constitutes the identity of an object? Can one give an account of what it means to say that a physical object exists? What are an object’s properties or relations and how are they related to the object itself?
Such questions have been the subject of inquiry by artists for decades (most notably Magritte and Kosuth) and now have taken on a new significance with the relatively recent introduction of technologically sophisticated digital illusions.
This series of artworks use flora and fauna commonly found in New Zealand and modifies them digitally in order to implicitly infer psychological, environmental, and social dislocations. My environment has clearly played an important role in the creation of this work. I moved from New York City in 1995, to rural New Zealand (where I live surrounded by sheep paddocks).
With an affinity to staged photography, these current images attempt through ambiguity of scale, material, reflection, and perspective to blur the line between images of virtual objects and actual objects in a believable but slightly skewed setting that is both convincing and unsettling.
Technical Information:
Sheep Jet Head is a 2D Lambda print created from a 3D file. The 3D file was modeled with 3D Studio software utilizing a displacement map of a jet plane icon on a model of a sheep composited on a photograph of rural New Zealand. The “displacement map modifier” modifies a dense wire frame mesh with a bitmap/raster image.
The light areas of a 2D image “push” the digital mesh while the dark areas “pull” the mesh, resulting in an embossed-like relief; the software pushes as if the vector mesh were a taut rubber sheet.
In the video, the same file is animated (composited on a different background in video). It was edited in Premiere Pro.
The rapid-prototype sculpture was created using the LOM (layered object manufacturing) process, an old rapid-prototyping process that cuts cross sections of the model on layers of glued papers with lasers.
Video:
Fleeced from Brit Bunkley on Vimeo.
