REPTIRE: RECLAMATION: Indoors- 'The Parlor' Diorama

AN UNEXPECTED OFFER…

One unexpected space that Hermitage Museum offered me to use for the Reclamation exhibtion was a large showcase just to the left of the 2 gallery spaces upstairs. This space was a bout 5’ x 6’ x 8’ tall, and about 2 feet off of the ground. This makes for a small room at the end of the hall, framed by a large picture window, which visitors peer through as they round the crest of the stairs, and approach the gallery spaces, around the corner to the right.

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

When Melissa offered me use of this chamber-like space, it didn’t take long to figure out what to do with it…

I had been thinking since I returned that while my site-specific plans were making good use of the grounds and gardens outside of the museum, I had not really duely addressed the interior of the museum. And the more that I thought about it, the more it seemed like there was some rich potential to create a dialogue with the elegant and artful furnishings in Sloanes’ living room. With this in mind, I made a special run to that great resource that is Scrap Exchange (when I returned to NC for supplies), and dug through their fabric and ‘notions’ section, gleaning some scraps of really REGAL upholstery fabric, and several bagfuls of dark and colorful trim…I also found there some large, dejected oval-shaped mirrors, with a nice wide bevel, very elegent…

So, as you can surmise, my aim was to attempt to recreate in this ‘vaulted chamber’ some of the ambiance of the Sloane’s own ‘parlor’ downstairs below- in essence, a diorama. The twist of course, was that many of these furnishings would incorporate the improbable material of tire rubber.

TIRES AND TRIM, COALLESCING…

This was a task, which I must admit, I set to work to, with glee.

I have always wanted to create a series of treadknot tire knots (a family actually), incorporating this sort of fabulous and stuffy pillow trim, and as I schemed on, it quickly became clear that this was the PERFCECT context from which to birth this family.

In fact, many unconscious currents of my tire craft over the last 9 years seemed to be COALLESCING in this ‘parlor diorama’. For instance, Luther, (the Snapping Turtle) himself, the Great Great Grand Daddy of my RepTire Art) found himself right at home at this ‘ball’, even getting himself gussied up with a new mount, complete with a mount-mount, featuring an elegant silk liner…

Luther's mount, mount..

Booyaa! How you like me now, Sucka!
Copyright, Travis Cohn/Reptire Designs 2011

‘PILLOW TALK’

For pillows, I made a pillow knot (part of what I call the ‘pillow talk’ series;), and also came up with a new design- a round pillow using a smallish ‘knobby’ tire.

This one incorporated some of that upholstery fabric and trim from The Scrap Exchange, and also some supporting materials scavenged around Norfolk,

including foam stuffing and cardboard doorskin.

It was a little tricky pulling this one together,

An early sketch

but finally, with some carefull planning,

and alot of patience,

I did pull it together.

In the end, I think it worked like a charm, especially with that button/dimple a the center (of the pillow AND the rose).

Its a pizza! Looks good enough to eat. Just like Mama Rosa used to make!

Some of my better work, I priced it high cause I wanted to keep it (or loan it to the Scrap Exchange), but I don’t know, it has some worthy admirers…

SPHERE DU MONDE

This scene was also the opportunity to bring into existence a certain ‘TireSphere’ that I have always wanted to create- the Globesphere. This incorporates a fancy French globe that I bought at this eccentric antique store. As the globe was French, and the French are undoubtedly lovers of the bicycle…I thought I would ‘round it out’ with some choice French ‘Forte’ racing tires. Perhaps I will have to rename it some day- “Sphere du Monde”….

SUPPORTING CAST

A supporting cast for this parlor diorama was furnished from a variety of sources. To get us started, I borrowed a favorite Persian rug from my studio, that my parents and I had hoisted from a Duke dumpster, way back in the glory days.

Melissa Ball generously lent the exhibit an essential chair from her office- one that had once belonged to Mrs. Sloane herself! While we had tried to locate a more ‘stately’ wingback, this one did fine, and its warm gold tones held the scene together well.

From my parents attic, I borrowed an end table that had once held my own grandfather Ted’s newspapers and various books. I think it was an unintended shock, and hopefully a treat also, for my mother to recognize this table and rug being displayed prominently in this museum showcase!

CENTER PIECE- The Mirror

The centerpiece of this diorama is the mirror. This was to be the collections most difficult piece to conceive, yet as is often the case, is ironically its most glorious success (in my own opinion).

This piece began with the ovular mirror that I found at the Scrap Exchange, while volunteering there by chance shortly before I embarked to Norfolk. I had been excited to discover the stack of mirrors, because the looked to be the general circumfrance of a bicycle tire….However, upon closer inspection, I found that most of the mirrors were variously scratched (which is probably why they were donated). Furthermore, I soon discovered that being VERY close to a perfect fit for an elegent mirror is a maddening FAR CRY from a true perfect fit.

I spent a good three weeks struggling to reconcile this difference.

I really had only one tire that was a worthy match for the mirror (an old ‘gum wall’, whose natural latex rubber sidewall was deteriorating with age in a way that made it look just like a nice stained wood) , but my attempts were not working out, at all……

I had tried to break the tire at its cardinal points, but the tension across the tire caused the bead to buckle, and drift away from the edge of the mirror, which it had previously promised to follow with uncanny ease. Thus, eventually I had to staple the thing back in place, and device edifices to cover up there moorings.

However, these edifices came be the piece’s crowning glory, and I embarked upon a whole new chapter in my craft, in devising them….

From the treads of 4 various different tires that I had laying around, I painstakingly cut various bits and pieces of this embossed black rubber, using these not only as ornamental motifs, but also to begin to tell a little bit of a story…

I began with a quit reptilianesque tread, using patches of this to anchor the 4 cardinal points of the mirror (and to cover the aforementioned necesary breaks in the tire’s bead).

To mount each of these pieces on, I used a shiny silver snap, which I thought mirrored the mirror in an interesting way, and of course always gleams spectacularly from the matt mat of black rubber. I thought that these elements helped to usher the mirror into a new state of being, or rather, brought out the ‘reptilian nature’ which I find latent the tire rubber…

My next motif was to be a feather motif. Its hard to say at this point if this was intentional, we were now well into the creative realm, but I found the mirror’s progression in to the aviary realm to be quite, well, ‘serpentdipidous’. I had discovered that the edges of the some of my thinner, more ‘fare’ road bike tires, exhibited a repeated chevron pattern. From this band, I hewed small delicate feathers, gently guiding their edges up, in the effort of the image of flight… I positioned these around the upper cardinal point, but intentionally left them of the point below. I wanted to leave this bottom point reptilian, in it’s a barest essence, with this essence mirrored, mirraculously, in the birds essence above. The piece was quickly taking on a life of its own…In fact too much so. It was beginning to look like some carnal swamp drama unfolding, maybe more fitting for Papa Mojo’s New Orleans inspired Road House Blues bar (I going to have to give them a call), than the home of the aristocratic Sloanes’…

And so, practicing sheer prudence, obeying my duty to the task at hand (once more), I decided to tone this carnage down a little, and add in some nice floral elements along the edges. Vegetation has that ability, to sooth, and balance out the brutal carnage of the animal kingdom…The vegetal God has been worshiped and valued for this reason since the Egyptians, at the very most recent.

First, I cut from the tread of a favorite Kenda mountain bike tire, a distinctly vine like motif. Then, echoing the fine toothed chevron combs of both the cut feathers (and the edging of the frame tire also), I added some sharp-looking amped-up jumbo chevron clusters to the tops of the vines/stems, fashioning two pairs of ‘river oats’. To these I added some more spears of feathers, becoming sheaths of leaves, to gaured and protect these noble stems which emerged from them.

And thus was born an entire aquatic ecosystem, unto this ovular mirror. To finnish it off, I added some silky, slimy black frog legs, snipped from innertubes, to the ‘reptile come amphibean’ ‘below’,

and a few sparrows soaring and darting in the air above.

If I had the chance, I would love to etch the silhouette of that meandering oak tree limb, that pierces (and comprises) my view of this estuary from my camper.

ILLUMINATION

Lighting this scene was little bit of a challenge. My best offer for this task was a certain lamp that my father, Steve, likes to call ‘Lola’…. With an enchanting road-burned tire knot serving as it base, and a fuscia feather boa draped laungidly and seductively for a lampspade, which glows with a beckoning ‘come-hither’ aura when turned on, Lola is 2 parts road warrior, and 6 parts burlesque / go-go dancer- the ruin of many a man. Indeed she brought an interesting twist to this ‘parlor’ diorama…

There was some concern from the Museum staff, that this addition might ‘burn the house down’ (its good reptutation, as well as its fantastic wooden halls and chambers). So in the end it was decided that the pink boa would have to go…

What to replace it with? At that late date (the day before the opening), I didn’t have time to create a new lamp shade (though I do have some half baked designs that could work someday). Fortunately for us all, Melissa’s fiancé, Carey works his uncle’s lamp shop, Ghent Lamp and Shade.

And so, with less than 48 hours before the opening, Melissa took me (with Lola in arm) to visit these fellows, and what a treat that was…

Their shop was a jewel encrusted cave of glowing gems. And the brightest glowing gems by far there were these two gents themselves. Immediately, these two warmed to the challenge, with gusto, floating over a stream of 20 different shades, each one augmenting the lamps knotted tire base in a different way. James quickly honed in on the qualities that made the lamp’s knot’s tire so special- the parallel strands of nylon cordage layn bare by the roughness of the road., and exhibitited on its surface. To make these strings sing, he found us a shade, whose knap or weave echoed these perfectly, I could not have hoped for a better match. The shade roundness also enhanced the form’s Asiatic murmers.

To this mounting manifestation, Carey, in a bolt of genius, added a crowning gesture….declaring that it needed a worthy finial, to finnsh it off once and for all.

To this task, he deftly swept up a recently retired motorcycle tire pressure guage, reclining on his work bench, and securing this in his vice, quickly fashioned this piece of apparatus into plume that any tire lamp would be proud of!

"Rhoda, the Reclaimed Reclaimed Tire Lamp

As a wise man once said, “Roxanne, you don’t have to wear that dress tonight”.
Much Thanks to these two Gents, for jumping and saving my butt (not to mention perhaps the Hermitage and its collection!), with style and pinach. These fellows speak well upon their country men.

So, here, at long last are some shots of the finnished Diorama.
Thanks also to Melanie and Melissa, for playing along, and trusting me on this impromptu, but apropo installation.