Glass Destruction Art Does Dallas

Paula Crown created an etched glass infinity box, then smashed it, and the results are gorgeous.

April 14, 2016, 3:05pm

Detail of Bearings Down. Images courtesy the artist

When one of Paula Crown’s glass artworks was damaged in transit, she did like Duchamp and incorporated it into a final artwork. That piece was Bearings Down (2013). Now, Crown is taking the serendipity of destruction even further with a new work of the same name, a three-channel video installation capturing her destruction of a glass box etched with her sketches.

“Bearings Down (2016) is a new performative video art piece based on the fracturing with ball bearings of a pristine specially-constructed etched glass infinity box. The ‘breaking’ in Bearings Down (2013) was a serendipitous occurrence; the piece was initially broken in delivery. This was a catalyst for spontaneous innovation. A moment of initial dismay turned into an opportunity to reframe: to create something from the destruction,” Crown explains to The Creators Project.

The new work is broken, too, but not by accident. The piece comprises Crown throwing steel ball bearings onto a glass box etched with a landscape drawing she conceived while herself in transit.

“Bearings Down is part of a series born while flying over the Drakensburg Mountains in South Africa," says Crown. "Captivated by the vast and exquisite topology, I began to sketch. Could I capture the ephemeral moments that I was experiencing through the drawings? How would the air currents, helicopter engine chatter and piloted direction affect the line quality?”

Inspired by the improvisation of Duchamp’s Large Glass, Bearings Down relinquishes certain artistic choices, leaving instead a chance-tinged indexical mark of the artist’s hand, one she compares to the indexicality of Jackson Pollock’s mark-making. The process was captured on video with high resolution film, its sounds with sensitive sound and vibration equipment. The video also incorporates digital animation into the live-action footage.

“Through scanning and digital imaging, three-dimensional depth maps were created and opened a portal. Landscapes were revealed within the lines of the landscape. The drawings continue to be evocative in an inspiring sense,” Crown muses.

Composer Nathanial Mann recorded the sound of the glass-breaking process, creating a soundtrack of the “shimmering sounds of glass falling and the bearings rolling.”

“The sound calls attention to the aftermath of the action, and the subsequent reverberations through the materials and airwaves. It heightens the sensations and the experience,” Crown expands.

The work is admittedly pretty difficult to imagine without seeing it in person, so we’ve got an exclusive GIF by the artist, below.

To help conceptualize the abstract, researched work, here are a few parting words from Crown on her inspirations:

“We inhabit, as Richard Feynman called, a world of ‘jiggling atoms.’ We live in a multiverse that is potent with possibilities. Such a concept is anxiety producing. Bearings Down (2016) is about ‘bringing forth’ a comprehension of one’s position in this uncertain dynamic world. I am compelled to draw, to feel, and to conceptualize the space between… the macro and the micro, the analog and digital and the poetic and rational.”