Deeper Look: Division No.7 “Gomorrah”

As the seventh installment of the Mirage Division, Gomorrah threw the rule book out of the window. From it’s inception, through its creation, to the story it would tell- it changed the tone of the narrative from an obedient specimen to a sample of lawless chaos. Where others before it modeled the simple interactions between symmetrical alternate worlds, it became the animal that would come to represent the failed consolidation of multiple universes.

Gomorrah looks like a miniaturized hell, with several piers jutting out of it’s core. Every texture is made to look unrefined; from heavily rusted steel components, to scorched spray foam, to concrete sections caked with graffiti. The lines of arcing piers swirl around the central mass leading with a hint of harmonious irony to the central vertical pier, which has come to personally represent an homage to the first of it’s kind, distinguished from its origin by reaching upward with desperate, solitary ambition.

Unlike it’s predecessors, Gomorrah was the product of spontaneous creation- there were no plans, just a strong desire to create the next work in the series. I wanted to be free of the pedestal, I wanted motion, I wanted to create a world instead of a segment of one. I wanted to break the slow process of the cast concrete, cast bronze, or anything that would inhibit progress in this exploration. I constructed a rough steel armature, and welded piers made of 1/4” round rod steel and masonry nails. When I needed a mass, I knew making a mold would be too complex for the spontaneity, so I turned to a spray foam insulation. The quick setting natural forms became just what this sculpture needed. I played around with spray painting the foam, but it looked too much like spray painted foam. This setback was frustrating, and one cathartic way to counter material frustration is to burn it. The burning and melting added to the chaotic/dystopian aesthetic that began to develop. concrete was applied like stucco to some surfaces and painted in red tones to tie in the rust of the steel.

Influences for Gomorrah were the suspended architectural works of Lee Bul that phased between creation and destruction, and the Sci-Fi television series “Fringe” where the main characters struggled to prevent the antagonists from destroying the world by merging it forcefully with an alternate universe.

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