A nice thing about A&P is that one can violate a cardinal rule and show unfinished work. And this is certainly the season for such.

There is a benefit to all the wind and snow in that it forces me indoors with its limited space and ventilation where I am obliged to work in a more preliminary mode. This time around it’s combinations of sticks as I try to stay on topic with the linkage theme.

As a follow up to the Christmas lights that I posted, I kept putting scissor jack units together, seeking to create a spiral effect that might either sit or hang. As matters sit it is hanging – for now.

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The spiral piece is an example of unexpected outcomes arising from dogged repetition. To my surprise, it turns out that the scissor jack units can be variously opened up, leading to an unanticipated sense of compression and release in the spirals.

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My preoccupation with the perspective function in “crop” is again evident in this image. Not knowing when to quit, I strung an utterly unwieldy succession of jacks together that neither wanted to be hung nor photographed. This attempt to compensate is a poor representation of the piece, but something in its distortions may show up elsewhere.

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Unlike the aforementioned sprawl of wooden kudzu, this object is hibernating. It, too, can be expanded quite far, but somehow I prefer it in its seasonally adjusted and huddled form with its sense of potential.

As so often can happen, this series showed up while I was looking for other things. The scissor jack motif was simply another item to get off a to-do list associated with the general linkage theme. Now I can’t see an end to it. There’s something so primitive about it and so wanting to become.

Is your work ever in reaction to such a mandate? Does the horse, the nude, the tree stamp a respective appendage and insist?