Corona Extra - ice sculpture

I normally post most of my work to the @onchainart community but I think this sculpture would be pushing it. It was purely commercial and even though, as with most of my work, I try to add a little something extra. I will opt-out.

I like to try, even with commercial work to soften the blow on the senses of the public. Advertising can be very aggressive and at times, some would say, a form of hijack (Who would say that? Me, of course!). Look at a city street and you will be bombarded by billboards, trying to grab your attention like some screaming guy on a soapbox. It is like legalised graffiti, Noone wants that crap inflicted on their view of the world. At least with graffiti artists, they are not trying to sell you stuff. Television ads will rob you of your time and try to subliminally convince you to buy stuff you don't need. So for me, when I make something I try to give it other elements that will make it more palatable for the eyes and mind as I try and respect my audience's attention.

Vetod

I had sent the ad agency a few ideas. Which involved human-sized figures doing interesting things and there, at the centre, just happened to be an Ice Cold Corona Extra bottle of beer. I wanted to reduce the hard sell and, have it as a product placement sort of thing with other elements to entertain and massage the public's ego before bam! They saw the advertisement. I believed the message would still come across and the image would be much more share-worthy. This for me would have also helped me enjoy the process of prostituting myself.

I was voted down and they wanted me to do the most mundane of my designs. A hand holding a bottle.

A chip off the old block

In the cold environment of my freezer studio, I had to use a lot of imagination to guess how it would finally look in its final location. It wasn't the most complex of sculptures and I made it all from one block of ice. I didn't work too much to resolve the surfaces as I knew the melting during its display would do that.

The most complex part was the logo on the bottle. The original is quite detailed and I so I had to see how simplified I could make it, that it would read and was be chunky enough to last over the course of the evening.

I used a pretty deep inlay of snow which I hoped would last longer as the whole thing melted.

This sculpture had to be displayed 250KM away in a nightclub in Cork and so I wrapped it in a sleeping bag and along with my display plinth with built-in lights, I loaded my Toyota Yaris and headed south.

Climbing two flights of stairs with this sculpture was difficult. Finally and with back pains to show for it, I had delivered and could forget about the thing. It is nice when your work self destructs into a puddle of water. Thankfully, my plinth has a built-in reservoir to collect this water and someone else would deliver this back to me in Dublin. So off home, I went but not before some photos.

Here is a photo of a pretty Irish girl standing beside it for scale. I was going to place this as the clickbaity thumbnail but I respect my audience too much for that.

alt

Ps

Thanks for reading. I use PeakD to document my work as an ephemeral Sculptor of sand, snow and ice, amongst other things. This will hopefully give it a new life on the Hive Blockchain. Below you will find some of my recent posts.