social Bowls

The bowl, is about the primitive storing of savings for the long term. In the traditional Chinese patriarchal family structure each generation works to have extra savings, this establishes wealth so that they can begin to establish authority over private property, a wife, and children. The bowl is one of the most powerful items in human society. Regardless of the identity, everyone has his or her own unique reliance on the bowl in relationship with their survival, as bowls serve most of our livelihood with the consumption and gathering of resources on Earth.

Often made of soil and shaped into a simple form, the bowl installation is a reflection of the mundane task of our daily life while at the same time critical of the current state of global welfare and institutional savings. The banality of a simplified bowl balances the unlimited means of the individuals portrayed in silhouette against the institutional wealth that fill it.

In visual art, we construct an object in space by beginning with dot, which progresses to a line, then a plane, and finally after some degree of time a geometry. In this process, we see a basic relational logic of creating an image across time and in the preliminary design, I explore the relational logic of making a form from the silhouettes of selected global financial leader’s faces proportional to their global wealth. I use ten profiles of world leaders to make a form and each face is a dimensional progression in itself, generated digitally from the same beginnings, a dot on the face equaling a dot in digital space.

By combining the ten profiles together, the form and the process of their formation, even though digitally, can invent a new relationship amongst each neighboring silhouette. Every section of the form is a bundle of relationships with each other, whether objectively between faces or subjectively in the financial politics of the countries leaders.

Together, they are making a new global form shaped from the distortion of space resulting from their relations. The resulting shape is a reflection on the coming together of their economies.