I made a Mess of Things...Elsewhere

Elsewhere was a real "change" for me as far as art is concerned. When I first walked into Elsewhere I thought that you could buy the items from the store. However I was wrong, very much so. The concept of the store was how the objects, that you cannot purchase, move around. The store is almost like a living breathing organism. It all started when I picked up the bouncy palls and slammed them into a colossus mess of instruments, some only pieces remained, and heard a loud crashing sound of atonality. I was worried they would lose the bouncy balls, but the owners didn't seem to care, they just kinda shrugged when things fell off the wall of bouncy balls flew across the room.

After having a brief walk through of the building, the owners explained to us that the whole purchase behind the building was change. Visiting artists would come there and move objects all around creating puns, and other strange creations. These creations shape the atmosphere and space within the environment. I can remember when I walked across the creaky "levitating" platforms over the glass bottles embedded within the floor that I was really experiencing that space. I felt like i was going to fall through any minute, and I quote Zach when he said "it was a leap of faith. "

There were many other experience's within elsewhere, almost too many to talk about so I'm just going to skip ahead to the drawing experience.

I heard the owner mention concept of layers many times over, and I decided that it would be a good Idea to try and draw my space using layers. So I started off by drawing a basic perspective of the space as shown below. (My space was the skyscraper) This picture is composed of a couple layers in itself, which included a layer of pencil, a layer of pen, and marker.


From here I took a new sheet of trace paper and drew in the objects that I saw within the space, some of which changed spots over the course of time. But this only added a neat messy effect to it. below are the objects in empty space without the structural layer added. As you can see the objects where drawn very quickly in a gesture type manner (this tends to be prevalent in my style).

From here I Layered the drawing to get a closer look at it, and realized that alot was going on in the drawing. I liked the way that felt , because Elsewhere was all about busy clusters of junk that moved around unknowingly. I decided that I wanted the space to stretch out more and have alot of contrast between the layers so I went back through and added another layer.

In this next layer I went back over the original structural perspective of the skyscraper and drew the lines so that they would interact with all the other lines. This created interesting weave in the drawing and I liked it because it felt more energetic, especially after I added the color, which was the next layer.

Here is the color layer in empty space.

Finally I got the final drawing of the space.




I would consider going back here in the future because everyone was so nice. I felt at home when I was there amongst the piles of mess. However still organized in some fashion, I still felt like maybe I could make art work without having a clear polished statement. Beyond art this space is an organism in all forms. I guess Mark Rothko was right about art in space.