Tell me about your work, “Tin Can Conversations.”
“Tin Can Conversations” is a series of artworks that uses the motif of a tin-can telephone to explore the fragility, complexity and profound value of interpersonal communication. These sculptures, video and kinetic artworks explore physical and psychological distance, miscommunication, disagreement, sensitivity, power dynamics, love and connection.
This exhibition was a collaboration with artist, friend and printmaker Barbara Ryan Gartin. We collaborated on one of the main sculptures in the exhibition at the Nackard Warehouse Gallery called “Wish You Were Here.” It features layered relief prints of scissors and needles on transparent paper wrapped around large tin cans. These cans face away from one another, mounted to the wall by bone-like wooden sconces. A red string connects the two cans, interrupted in the middle by a suspended wooden wishbone.
The rest of that space was filled with my sculptures and a video artwork. Another new artwork I created for this show, “Fault Lines,” features two 7-foot-tall wooden panels that stand opposite one another. One panel has a tin can embedded into it at heart height, and the other one at head height. Strings connect each of these cans to arrows embedded into the opposite panel, which look as though they have been shot from across the room. This creates a web of strings connecting the two panels, but conspicuously, no arrows seem to have hit their intended target.
What inspired you?
This series of artwork was inspired primarily by a difficult cross-country displacement and by the challenge of maintaining healthy relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the collaboration with Barbara, the inspiration has expanded to include wishbone, scissor and needle imagery, which evoke time with loved ones and the severing and repairing of relationships through communication.
What is next for you?
I plan on seeking new venues throughout the Southwest that would be interested in exhibiting these artworks. It has been wonderful exhibiting this locally, but expanding the audience for this series is something I would like to do. I also treasure the collaboration with Barbara, and we created more ideas than we had time to build, so we may work on realizing some more of our collaborative artworks in the future, even outside of the tin can series.
Mariana Laas | NAU Communications
(928) 523-5050 | mariana.laas@nau.edu