This week I wanted to touch on the background behind my bottle sculptures. I initially became interested in portraying these items after coming across hand-painted signage from Los Angeles. Ironically, this investigation developed through the use of Google Street View, as I had just moved to New York from Los Angeles a couple months before. Over the course of a few months, I collected over 500 images of storefronts that showcased detergents, milk, and other household products.
I found these bottles to be endearing because they confidently defied standards of photo-realism. The use of Google also proved to be to my advantage because many of the bottles have been painted over throughout the years, but Google’s records extend back to 2007. The photo quality around this time is very poor, though I actually appreciated this obscurity and wanted to capture it in my own art.
At first I began by creating paintings with a blurry quality, but I knew that I wanted to adapt these images into 3-dimensional forms as well. I felt that paper mache would lend itself well to this because of its simple character. As a result, I began to convert the images into sculptures, doing my best to interpret their blurry and misshapen quality. The images below outline my transcription process, from the Google screenshots, to drawings, and finally the sculptures themselves.
