“Side Reactions”
The products I wasn’t trying to make.
A side reaction is what forms while you are busy making something else. Not a mistake, exactly. Just not the target. Every one of these started that way, and none of them has anything to do with the others, so I have stopped pretending they add up to a body of work. They add up to a person.
The Wall is the one that explains the rest, so it goes first.
In my office, I have a wall. On the wall I paste notes I have written to myself during periods of self-reflection and self-isolation. Some of the words are playful, some are serious. Messy and raw, they represent my psyche in its most naked and vulnerable state.
There is wisdom in this soup of nonsense. The wall helps me remember who I am and who I want to be. The pages land somewhere between zen koan, poetry, and art: hand-lettered, declarative, and not interested in being argued with.
It is also, I think, the honest version of what the rest of this panel is doing: making something with no audience in mind and finding out later that it meant something.
Pigmented epoxy resin, poured and left to find its own arrangement. I set the initial conditions and the fluid does the composition, which is the same bargain I make in the laboratory: choose the starting conditions carefully, then get out of the way and see what the physics wants. Here the answer arrives in an afternoon, and it arrives in color.
On a screen I can do the things the physical world charges too much for. Zoom in past what any lens would resolve. Give a molecule a nebula to sit in. Repeat a line ten thousand times without my hand getting tired, until repetition stops reading as pattern and starts reading as motion. Most of these are the same impulse as everything else here, which is to render something at a scale or in a palette that it does not get in life, and then look at it.
I built a trail, right up the side of my neck of Fourmile Canyon. Construction at the scale of a landscape, done with hand tools and time. I built it; my family named it.
I probably stacked 10,000 rocks to make this trail, which I find 10,000 times better than a gym membership.
The Wall
Pour Decisions
Pixel Pushing
Daddy's Trail
Carson J. Bruns, Associate Professor, ATLAS Institute and the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder.