This is a sculpture that I built my senior year at BGSU; I called it "In Case I Wasn't Heard". It's a megaphone cannon and yes it works quite well! Unfortunately, I wasn't able to finish it in time for my BFA show. Nevertheless, I took it to a photographer and had it photographed inside his studio. Technically, they were great photo's but the piece just didn't feel right in a studio environment, it wasn't working conceptually. Fast forward to this past weekend... I was at my brother's farm, it was one of those sunny summer days, the sky was bright blue and full of fluffy marshmallow clouds. Mark mentioned that I should take some pictures of my cannon; I had brought my camera and tripod along so I figured why not. So after taking pictures all day I came home and starting working on them. I was pleased at how well they turned out. The pictures brought this piece to a whole new level. The clouds were perfect; they look very menacing, especially in the pictures where I'm pushing the cannon. It looks like I am heading to war! In the ones where the cannon is all alone, there is a real sense of loneliness, of searching, of waiting for a response of some sort. Taking these pictures out at the farm helped me learn something about my work. The object, in this case the cannon, became a "prop" in these pictures, it was no longer a precious object, it became nothing more than a set prop for the story. I think the cannon could still stand on its own as an object but it took the right environment for it to work conceptually.
