I arrange in ways where there is a certain amount of space between objects. I try to feel how much energetic tension exists within this space and to bring the object just up to the point of tension but not beyond that.
A consideration is, how does it affect the arrangement if the objects are fragments of a whole vs whole object within themselves. Does that change the nature of this energetic tension that exists within the space. Perhaps that is a rhythm or a vibration whose frequency is defined by the space between the pulses.
Secondly, another consideration is the number of iterations that can be generated given the objects. For each object added to the source collection, this introduces a new exponent for iterations. It is very much like calculating probability based off of variables.
When selecting which object to start with for a new iteration, I select with intuition. Where does the energy lead me. Is this based off the visuals or the actual presence of the mass, or a combination of both? Then each successive object is added in relation to the whole. It is like a road that is constantly unfolding one step at a time.
Within my project, the objects — wooden blocks with a painted image — are arranged with a play of making sense of images vs disassociating and making an arrangement based off of sensory information.
But what happens when the object is not an image. What if the object is an actual object that has its own material properties. Does one still arrange based off of visuals or energetic relations or both?
These are considerations for exploration and do not necessarily need to have answers immediately.
One hour later: I have just made a further realization. I have been making arrangements of this nature my entire life. If I sit at a table somewhere, let’s say at a diner, I will be compelled to arrange things in front of me energetically. That is, based off the tension, or lack of, they create based on the space in between the objects. I may place and point the fork to my left a certain distance from the plate, and similarly the knife on the right side a certain distance and direction. I do this with furniture as well — I guess that is unknowingly a sort of feng shui. Although present in this project, it was subconscious. From this point forward it is conscious.
II. THE MAGNETS — NOVEMBER 13, 2024
I needed to find a hanging display solution for the Alternate Sides Art Project and I decided to try affixing neodymium magnets to the back of the blocks and placing them on a black magnetic board. The current boards are a bit smaller than I prefer but I came upon a new discovery in the process — using the magnets allows me to create newer arrangements that were not previously possible when I had to stack the blocks. The release of gravity now gives me an added freedom in compositions.
It is interesting, the many considerations that come up as I explore this project further. Several artists in a collective I am a part of called Chop Shop have been instrumental in the exploration, as they have suggested things to consider such as moving the parts on the Z axis. The more time I dedicate to the project, the more that becomes revealed as it evolves.
III. TWO YEARS ON
I left those questions open on purpose. Some of them have answered themselves through the work, and I want to record where they landed.
Fragments and whole objects hold different kinds of tension.
I have now made arrangements of both. When the objects are fragments of a single face, the tension between them never settles — the eye keeps trying to close a body that will not close, and the interval stays charged because something is missing from it. When the objects are whole in themselves — a family scene, a painted panel of one thing that matters to someone — the tension is not anatomical but narrative. The question changes from what is this to what happened here. Same spacing instinct, two different charges. The fragment pulls toward completion. The whole object pulls toward sequence.
There is a third case I did not separate out at the time. Some blocks carry no image at all — a bare surface, or a texture magnified until it stops reading as a picture of anything. Nothing arrives already meaning something, so there is nothing for the arrangement to modulate. The interval becomes the only source of meaning available. That is the hardest of the three, and the closest to Cage.
The threshold is not a distance. It is relative to mass.
Just up to the point of tension but not beyond has been my rule since before I could name it, but I had been treating it as though it described a measurement. The shells in the garden are packed nearly edge to edge, some overlapping, and they hold tension perfectly well. Painted blocks at eighteen inches need inches of space to do the same thing. So the threshold scales with the size and density of what is being arranged. Small and dense holds charge at a hair’s width. Large and open needs room. This is why tiling registers as wrong to me — not because the objects are close, but because the interval has collapsed to nothing and the pulse disappears with it.
An arrangement has a tempo.
The line I wrote almost in passing — a rhythm or a vibration whose frequency is defined by the space between the pulses — turns out to be the most useful thing in the entry. If the interval sets the frequency, then a wide gap is a slow pulse and a tight one is fast, and an arrangement can be read as a measure rather than a picture. In one recent piece, three small blocks stepping up at the edge function as a quick triplet against long sustained tones. I did not plan that. I felt it and then found the language for it afterward.
This is also where I understand my own attraction to Cage’s 4’33”. The silence is not the absence of the piece; it is the piece. The space between my blocks is not a gap in an image. It is a something, with its own duration.
Gravity was a constraint, not a given.
In the very first notes for this project, in January 2024, I wrote that the gravity is not on one singular image but of the parts that make the whole. I meant it as emphasis. Ten months later the same word came back as physics. The magnets were meant to solve hanging; what they actually did was remove gravity from the composition. Stacked, every block had to rest on something, and the arrangement was partly dictated by what could physically hold what. On the steel field, a block can sit anywhere. Arrangements became possible that had not been available to me before.
I want to keep that in mind as I look for a display that lets an audience handle the blocks. A table or a shelf would hand gravity back, and I would be trading one freedom for another. A vertical steel plane may be the answer rather than a ledge.
The question my Chop Shop colleagues left me with was: if the interval between blocks carries weight and tempo across the surface, what is the interval in depth? I have since made one arrangement of the self-portrait blocks standing free at different distances from the front, and it produced three things I did not anticipate. Blocks crossed in front of each other, so walking past changed the composition — the viewer became a variable without touching anything. Cast shadow became an element, and it is the one part of an arrangement I do not place directly: I set the blocks, the light sets the shadows, and the interval acquires a double on the surface behind it. And with the blocks off the board, the backs became visible — bare sawn wood, ears turned edge-on, an arrangement in which the painting has almost entirely disappeared. That is the alternate side, literally, and the magnetic board had been hiding it.
These are already relief objects. I had been composing in two dimensions on a surface that has three.
The shells taught me something about direction.
Nearly every arrangement I have framed is centered and roughly symmetrical. The shells in the garden are not — they run as a spine, a column with a beginning and an end, something closer to a procession or a path than a composition. I have never done that with the blocks. It is next.
When the object is not an image.
This was the question I could not answer in 2024, and the work has since laid out a full range without my planning it.
At one end are the shells: objects with no image at all, arranged entirely by mass and presence. At the other end are the portrait fragments: pure image, arranged by both picture and feel, with the two often pulling against each other. In between are recent blocks painted from the textures of Caribbean root vegetables, magnified until they stop reading as pictures of anything and start reading as surface — an image of material, at the scale of material. And the found objects that enter some pieces, a utensil or a lid from an actual encounter, are arranged the way the shells are: by weight and position, not by depiction.
So the answer to does one arrange based off of visuals or energetic relations or both is that it depends on how much image the object is carrying, and that the same instinct operates across the whole range. The hand does not change. What changes is how much the eye is allowed to interfere.
— MIGZ
