Blam! Swish! Knock!

I think about the ancient Greeks Bronze sculptural ideas and then I think about iron. Iron is the ugly step-child to bronze. Iron doesn’t represent man’s ideal accomplishments in the way bronze has come to be known to art historians and the arts. Iron, unlike bronze, is not always a perfect shiny cast but iron has strength, perseverance, and warmth, unlike other alloys. The material is like skateboarding to surfing, it’s beating your head on the pavement to landing in a warm Californian ocean wave.

Illustration by Dave Bruno

Photographs of iron usually involve child labor or a coal miners “black lung” from the 1920’s. Casting iron isn’t like remotely working from a computer, it’s dirty and gritty and makes a mess, is hot and makes you sweat. The material itself is overly abundant like the stuff your downstairs hoarder neighbor collects: iron is a form of raw metal trash. I think of myself working with a “raw iron metal trash”  when I think about working with the Abominog art collective. These collective members are a  bunch of hardworking artists who push the rock up a hill working with metal craft.

With the collective I have a routine without the frequency of a job and sometimes stuff gets made. Sometimes people show up for the pour and other times people don’t.

In fact, I’m sure that there are a lot of people involved with the Abominog collective that I’ve never met.

The collective works on a shoe-string budget and with a great deal of panic. The collective doesn’t always agree on what to cast but continues in a common direction, with a common goal. The collective work is wholesome work without sanctimonious posers.

Illustration by Dave Bruno

I enjoy the act of helping with artworks beyond mine, and me.

It can be rewarding to work as a member of an art group in the same way accomplishment can be achieved working on a building. At times, working with a collective shows how selfish people are when getting art made. It can be comical. I view the collective as part “group therapy art project” with burning hot metal or part the “frustration against the mundane aspects of life schedules” with searing hot metal. No stylus needed in an iron pour.

Iron pours are like rebuilding ancient pyramids or moving jobs, cool when finished but better done by the ancients trove of slaves while drinking beer and watching re-runs of the History channel. Abominog is a collective contradiction of Art and glad to have had the opportunity to work around and with people of the collective. Everyone at a pour seems to transcend the individualistic aspects and pursuit of art and art making to get stuff done.

PLEDGE TODAY!

Celebrate the 10th anniversary of Art All Night – Trenton with us this June 18th and 19th. 

Help fund the Kickstarter campaign that will make it possible, and get one of the awesome rewards being offered. (Pssst! There’s one for every pocket size.)

It.will.be.epic.