The Finishing Touches For Captain Galactikka In The Third Dimension

 

Back in 2018 I made a piece called Collectors' Issue (click here to read the Earlier Post) for my show Pop Culture Palimpsest at The Figge Art Museum.  The main character in Collectors' Issue is Captain Galactikka.

Not long after the show closed, I decided to make a physical Captain Galactikka sculpture to join my growing pantheon of pop culture product mascots. Here he is at the spray foam, chicken wire, and plywood stage.  I'm just trying to get the basic shape at this point.

Then I crisscross the body with duct tape so I have anchor points for the layers of fabric I am going to hot glue into place to form the 'shell' of the piece.

Captain Galactikka and Lil Seezer side-by-side in the studio.

After several layers of fabric and paint, the outer coating is in place.  The spray foam is strong enough to form an acceptably solid inside structure, but if I covered the piece with a brittle coating, the foam has the potential to give just enough so the outside would crack.

Now to make the details out of cardboard, wrap them in fabric, and attach them to the sculpture as well.

Mouth and nose are in place.

Starting to get the details added and primed into place.

Then I add some more...

The base is comprised of a whole bunch of laminated plywood and Bondo...

This Captain Galactikka at the tale end of our time in the old studio.  I would frequently hang my winter jacket on his extended pointer finger when I arrived at the studio in the morning...

A sculpture that is so muy macho it took TWO STUDIOS and ONE SHOP to finish!  Anyway, here we are in the new space and it is time to cover the sculpture with several coats of iron metallic surfacer and then hit it with a rusting compound.  Instead of trying to make a rust-colored paint, you actually produce rust.

Letting things 'air out' before spraying another coat...

You can see the rust start to appear...

The captain is ready to go off to be part of Citizen Beige!

Out of The Wasteland: A New Studio Takes Shape...

 I've been without my own studio space for over a year now.  I had access to a ceramics studio through December of last year.  Starting in January, nothing.  That's now changing.

I've secured a new space for a year and I am pretty darned excited about it.  I have a lot of things to move in, shelves to build, portable walls to construct, and pieces on which to resume working.

Here's a few shots of the process...

This was the space when I first visited it during the summer of 2022.

This is a shot of my first wave of pieces coming into the space.

Slowly, but surely getting things moved in.

I need to build a whole series of shelving units to hold my various pieces + art-making materials.

It's not a Steve Banks studio until I have an ACTUAL pencil sharpener installed and ready to use.

More shelves.

Shelves fill up quickly.

Some of the lumber used to create the shelves is recycled wood from Terry Rathje's and my piece Vestibule that we made for Terry's show Questionable Architecture all the way back in 2013 at the Figge Art Museum.  You can read my blog posts regarding Terry's awesome show by clicking these various links: The Figge Gig Part 1, The Figge Gig Part 2, and The Figge Gig Part 3.

Here's some of the last remnants of Vestibule waiting to be pressed into service one more time...

There they are in shelf form...(this time)...

That post shelf-building glow...

Starting to fill up. gonna need more shelves...

To make things a little spicier while I was moving the first waves of materials into my new studio, mother nature decided to have a bit of a flood outside.  If the HESCO barriers aren't up to the task this time, I'm going to know about it almost instantly (*spoiler* they held up just fine).

Water bubbling up around a manhole cover.

More adventures await!

Some Wood-Fired Goodness and a 100K+ Milestone

A couple months ago I participated in a wood firing we had over at Augustana College - check them out here: https://www.augustana.edu/ ).  I'm just now getting around to posting a few pictures from the experience.

They have two side-by-side kilns.  We usually use the big kiln for wood fires, but this time we decided to see if we could get the small kiln up to temperature.  Sometimes the design of the kiln (size of the fire box, airflow, etc can affect the kilns ability to fire smoothly, or even get all the way up to the higher temperatures).  We were trying to get to over 2400 degrees Fahrenheit, so that's pretty damn toasty.

*Spoiler alert* we got there!

Here I am with a heat visor on. 25% to shield from heat 100% to keep from getting hot embers in my face. 30% so I could take this selfie to prove I was there...

It was a fairly toasty day, so standing around a hot kiln wasn't nearly as enticing as it can be when it's a late Fall firing.  Anyway, this is what I got on the backside of the firing.

I'm really happy with the results, I used a few different glazes this time instead of just relying solely on the atmospheric conditions inside the kiln.  There are still a few patches of bare clay, but some glaze too!

*One final note...  Some how.  Some way. Somewhere along the way Punching Holes In The Rah-Rah crossed over 100,000 visitors.  Ooooda-Lolly!!

Next time we'll take a look at the new stooood.