Human Xerox Machine
On April 25th, 2018 the Advanced Drawing class at Chapman University collaborated together in the ongoing project, “Human Xerox Machine”. Each year the professor, Cindy Rehm, proposes the project to the class. Essentially the project takes objects from outside volunteers and the class attempts to recreate that object visually through found materials everyone brings to class. The project each year gets named something slightly different by each Advanced Drawing class. This year we chose, “Human Xerox Machine”. Each class member was assigned a portion of the preliminary or post work with making the project, as well as participating in the actual recreation of objects as well.
Sometimes it is difficult to recruit volunteers to come drop things off through the window in our handmade door. However, this year through social media and word of mouth, we were able to gather a decently large influx of items. Each item that was dropped off was then taken and labeled with the owners name and phone number as well as a short description of the object. This was done so that we are able to identify who owns what exactly so we can safely return the objects to the owners. Each object then was chosen by students to recreate. On average it took us around 10-20 minutes to recreate each object. Yet some items went by faster than others based on their difficulty.
As an artist this was an amazing exercise to think about how one can manipulate materials for a desired effect. Many times we are not encouraged, or necessarily given the opportunity to experiment and play with materials. This was a fun and random exercise, in the nature that we constructed a couple rules on how to operate and everything from that point on was randomly handed to us. Most of the objects were roughly the same size since they had to be transported through a small hole in the door. However, some of these objects weren’t inanimate. We got a visit from one of the beloved art dogs on campus, Klaus. In addition to Autumn, a new pup one of our classmate’s new companion.
Being forced to be open and ready to anything that comes through the door is something difficult to do at first. However, soon after creating the first or second object, it was incredibly easy and exciting to not have any idea as to what the subject is or how you will execute it prior to doing so. Below are some images from the event, hopefully showing the amount of creativity and problem solving that it took to recreate these objects. Thank you to everyone who came out and participated in the event, as well as a thank you to Cindy Rehm for allowing us to be a part of this great ongoing project.
photos credited to Cindy Rehm
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