This Year’s Model
This is an installation that uses my (not very new!) car. I am planning to knit a complete sky-blue covering for my 1999 hatchback. The car would then be driven (uncovered) to the site, covered, and parked. The knitting will conceal all windows; door handles lights etc, so that the car appears as a solid 3 dimensional knitted form. Side mirrors will either be separately covered or removed. Wheels will either remain uncovered or be covered individually.
Ideally the location would be unannounced so that people would just come upon it parked on street, among other cars or alone. There is a possibility of moving it at night during the festival (uncover, move, re-cover) so that it would be seen in 2 different parking spots, on 2 different streets. The viewer’s discovery of then it becomes part of the piece.
This Year’s Model is an everyday object transformed by the removal of its functionality. The knitted car is not for driving. Its physical self is altered therefore altering meaning. This year’s model has some problems! The moving vehicle becomes a stationary object, seen in an entirely different way.
Placement alongside other parked vehicles adds to the questions raised. Which has greater value, the car or the sculpture? Is the undrivable vehicle still actually a car? What is the resale value? The blue color refers both to the cliché of the car as a “new baby”, and to the idea of creating a blank space; some sky on the ground. This Year’s Model is a humorous, small-scale commentary on consumerism, art, and the high price of gasoline.
Cynthia Ruse - 2008
(click to download .pdf version)
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Keep Off the Grass
Grass sod will be unrolled and placed together on a sidewalk covering one entire block. The grass will be placed during the night to prevent pedestrian disturbance as well as to provide an early morning surprise to anyone who passes by on their regular route to wherever they are going.
The industrial urban landscape is an ideal setting for this piece in which space and material are transformed and also transform each other. The location will be a narrow side street in which concrete meets bridge and sky. The pedestrian focus will no longer be concrete but an unexpected thoroughfare of green, simultaneously small and large, fragile and defiant. It is intended to be experienced both as a formal sculpture and as an interactive installation, causing people to veer from their accustomed daily path.
There is the possibility of enhancing this piece by the placement of signs indicating: “Please take off shoes” and “keep off the grass” which may or may not be obeyed. The signs are a catalyst which gauges the threshold between public and private space creating questions as to how one should react.
The interaction of people with this piece and its inevitable deterioration will be documented. After this project is finished, some of the grass sod will be distributed to the public to take home and plant, the rest will be used to create a new patch of green space, for example: a vacant lot or area need of green.
Cynthia Ruse and Myk Henry - 2007
(click to download .pdf version)
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Knotted
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream
-Edgar Allan Poe
Yards of irregular width “ribbon” are knitted, then shaped and placed with other components, such as small- scale clay furniture. These furnishings often have holes in their centers from which things symbolically drip. This work is a combination of knitted elements and these other 3-dimensional works, video projection, and silence.
Knotted can be seen either as a door that can’t be completely opened, or one that shuts tight behind you. It is a reflection of the realization that things are not what they appear, and a manifestation of the uneasiness that can accompany this acknowledgment. It is like the type of mystery where information is presented in many small vignettes. The solution comes from trying to place all of them together in the right order, and fill in the missing pieces. A world is created where things are allowed to hang in limbo, not really ever making sense. Participation comes by entering, and with the instinctive search for the one thread which could potentially “solve” or, unravel the whole thing!
Red, in its many shades, is the primary color here. Ribbons of knitted fabric wind together in insect-like forms. These hang on walls or from the ceiling and cascade down and across floor. Some parts are confined to small cages. In other places the forms end in single strings, which form mazelike masses on the floor. Certain lines are continued, drawn in pen directly on the wall.
A long river or vein-like form crosses the floor; its tributaries are attached to hand sized clay beds. This path ends at a small projected image of a sealed doorway shown at floor level. A heavy dark wood beam leans against the wall, a small clay chair with strands of red beads “dripping” from underneath balances on top. These disparate lines and pathways meet, entwine and separate. Loose threads extend out and form other paths in. They are tangled, and unbound. The feeling is of convergence and freedom.
I am interested in the idea of the path as a vein, a scar, a line. It shows where you are going and where you have been. All lines lead away from something, towards something else.
A video is looped showing the row-by-row creation and destruction (knotting and unknotting) of a long red ribbon of yarn on a knitting machine. No person is visible, the machine seems self-driven. The continual building and breaking down aspect causes an uncomfortable sense of being out of place, the unnerving and constant dissection of what is real.
Cynthia Ruse - 2007
(click to download .pdf version)