Aluminum Can Sculpture
In the ongoing process of art-making, one must explore whatever ideas come into ones brain. If you start stifling yourself because it seems "silly" or childish, you begin to distance yourself from your creativity. On a recent walk, I began noticing how many aluminum cans were lying on the street -- beer cans, seltzer cans, etc. -- and how perfectly and utterly flattened many of them had become, thanks to being driven over endlessly by cars. It occurred to me that, even if I wanted to create these kinds of cans myself, I could never match the particularly "ground-down" look achieved by having been run over by dozens or hundreds of different cars in different ways. In a sense, this sculpture was "made" by the people of the city of Pittsburgh (their cars, at least). It was only up to me to collect the cans and arrange them. I plan to do more of this kind of thing, if only because I have an irresistible impulse to pick up these perfectly flattened cans.
