Full Circle: You CAN Have It Both Ways... from one work of art to another

I use found materials in my work. "Found object" is really just a fancy, generic name for non-traditional components used in a piece of art. Most of the raw materials I use are glass beads, which can take lots of different forms, but if you expand the notion of "bead" to include anything with a hole in it, this form can take you far and wide.

When creating hanging collages for the "Station Identification" exhibit last year, I strung together 29-cent bead and sequin packages, game pieces, and other things that poke fun at some craft artists' attempts at elitism and fine-art-world-acceptance.  Each corner of the exhibition space had a theme, the black-and-white theme being the either/or attitudes that begat the "this is art/that's not art" silliness. 

I used an old on/off switch that I'd found at a garage sale to finish off the bottom of the hanging collage.  How much more either/or can you get than an on/off switch? 

Last year when I was sorting through my beads-and-wacky objects stash for this piece, my very significant other George spotted the switch and wanted to commandeer it for his music gear stash. It's a good switch, nice and snappy; bad ones get wiggly and can go to the other position when you don't want them to. Being the one who found it, though, I called dibs on it and used it to wire the "Gleem" silver ribbon spool positioned under the rubber shrunken head.

"Station Identification" installation view

It traveled with the rest of "Station Identification" to Mesa Arts Center in Arizona last January (http://www.mesaartscenter.com/), came back to Portland and then visited Guardino Gallery in July (sans the Fruit Chew corner, which found a new home), and came to rest back in my basement. It's still in the basement, but it underwent a transformation two nights ago.

Rear view of Traynor amplifier, new home for the on/off switch

Two nights ago George was fixing some funny-noise problems with our righteous Traynor amplifier, a magnificent piece of vacuum-tube-powered equipment that we've been playing bass through since 1985. It was not new then; it's from about late 1967. He replaced the big tubes, then the little tubes. You know how when you clean one thing, suddenly something nearby begins to look filthy? That happens with cars, and music thangs too. In the course of all this revamping he noticed that the "on" light flickered off... never a good thing. That would be a problem with the switch. After 43 years and thousands of on/off-ings it was flaking out. You want your audience to do the wiggling, not the switch. So when he announced he was off to the store for a new one I remembered the switch...

This is why I usually don't use glue to assemble artwork. Better to weave it with thread or link it with telephone wire. All I had to do was clip the wires connecting the switch to the hanging collage, and it was freed up for use as... a switch!  Full circle, from on/off switch to art back to on/off switch. Out with the old, in with the, er, old-but-functional!

Traynor stack in all its powerfully loud glory

And now a public service announcement:  Don't Do This At Home! Taking apart or poking about in amplifiers of any kind can electrocute you. If they're open in the back don't reach in, even when they're not plugged in. There are capacitors in there that store very large amounts of current that are just as jumpy when unplugged as they are when they're plugged in and turned on. Don't be a fry-baby!

Sure sounds great now... I was inspired enough to play bass through it for the first time in waaaaay too long. It felt incredibly good to feel the sound hitting my chest as I played (the whole thing comes up to my chin).

P.S.  Back before we bought this amplifier, someone had taken some white paint and carefully inked in the number "11" on every knob...  At 130 watts (a conservative estimate), it's plenty loud for basement fun at "3"...  Traynors are made in Toronto and along with Sunn, Hiwatt, and of course Marshall, are well loved.  I consider them works of art (with point-to-point soldering, not a printed circuit board, etc), so this on/off switch kind of went from one type of art to another.