This is the final installment of this series, you can find part one here. At the opening, a lot of people asked me what kind of hair or fur is covering this piece. It is actually musk ox, and it comes from a musk ox rug that I bought on eBay for $550.00 (which is actually a bargain compared to some others I had seen). I was originally planning on using an old bear skin rug  I had obtained, but I didn’t like the thinness of the hair; this one certainly remedies that. The hair is over a foot long in some places, and incredibly thick– too thick, in fact, to be believable, and has had to be thinned out quite a lot to look right.

Musk ox hair

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False Proof

September 11 - October 3 , 2009
Curated by Cable Griffith

Nola Avienne, Zack Bent, Jana Brevick, Drew Christie, Jonathan Gitelson, Eugene Parnell, and Samantha Scherer.

Opening reception: Thursday, September 10, 6 - 8:30 PM

False Proof

It is human nature to linger on the threshold between rational thought and total fantasy, fact and fiction, known and unknown, natural and supernatural, regardless of religious or spiritual persuasion. A great many things in the universe defy explanation, and in some ways, we prefer it that way. Answers can sometimes be cold and decisive, shutting the door to the fundamental question at the root of creativity, “What if?” The artists in False Proof address several of these time-tested phenomena by creating work that exploits the bubbles we preserve between knowing and not knowing.

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This is part 4 of this series, you can see part three here. In the last installment, we saw the process for casting a body part as a hollow fiberglass and resin shell. In this post, we’ll look at the other casting method I use, solid casting with urethane plastic.

The left hand of Bigfoot, modeled in clay

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Via Justin Beckman, a site I just can’t stop looking at: crappytaxidermy.com. It’s nothing but a running series of photos of, well, crappy taxidermy, which collectively prove a point I have been trying to make for a long time: bad taxidermy is much, much more interesting than good taxidermy. By far the most interesting images are those of earnest but ill-fated attempts at re-creating animals using preserved skins and body parts.

image credit curious expeditions

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The Museum of Animal Perspectives is not quite like anything I have ever seen. Tiny cameras, strapped to the backs of animals, or hidden in their living quarters, give us perspectives impossible to obtain any other way. What’s most interesting, about all of these, from my point of view, is that you can witness the goings-on in the absence of a narrator interpreting events. It reminds me of a very interesting experience I had once at my brother’s house: he had just gotten digital tv, and was tuned to a PBS digital channel on which Nature or something similar was playing. But there was something wrong with the signal, or the tuner, such that, because the narration was on a separate digital track from the background sound, it was somehow missing. From the context of the program, it was obvious that we were intended to hear David Attenborough’s voice telling us all about Patagonian sea birds and their mating habits. But instead, all we heard was wind and bird cries, and we were left to piece together the narrative on our own. A much different, and probably more interesting, viewing experience.

Below is what a Nine-banded armadillo sees on its nightly rounds. Or, more properly, what you’d see if you were the size of a Star Wars action figure and riding on its back.

This is the third post in this series: for part one, go here. In part two, we saw how the body of the piece is cast and then carved from expandable urethane foam, and now let’s have a look at the finished mannequin:

Front view of the finished mannequin

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This is the second installment of this series– the first is here. The final piece, like most of my large pieces lately, will be constucted largely of urethane foam, like a commercial taxidermy mannequin, with recycled animal skin rugs glued over it. With a piece this large, it is necessary to have some kind of hard armature inside the foam to give it greater structural strength.

Commercial taxidermy mannequins above a certain size have threaded steel rods in their legs to help strengthen them. This is easy to accomplish at the commercial level because the entire mannequin is cast as one or two pieces in large silicone-and-fiberglass molds, and the rods can be affixed in place inside the molds before the foam material is injected.

That’s not an option for me, because I will not be casting foam into a mold; this would require sculpting a life-sized sasquatch in several hundreds of pounds of clay, then using gallons and gallons of expensive silicone and fiberglass resin (can you imagine the smell?) to produce a mold that would also weigh hundreds of pounds. If I were making a thousand copies (an army of sasquatches?) that might be feasible but not for a one-off piece.

So instead I will be building the foam structure up over the armature directly, and cutting and rasping the final shape from a life-sized foam blob.

All of which doesn’t preclude me from using threaded steel rod for the armature, but considering I don’t have a welding kit in my studio, I have opted for plywood instead, it’s just easier to work and strong enough for the job.

Maquette of the finished piece alongside maquette of plywood armature

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