Baumwoll Archives

Andrew Reach, His new work of art

EMPYREAL TOWER

Andrew Reach is my husband of 44 years. He never seems to stop pushing himself to keep going on . Even with all his pain, his mind will not rest or his desire to create art and architecture. He lost his career of architecture to illness. He began doing art for healing his soul. It took almost 20 years and his architecture and his art have merged to do public art. Here is his new work. It will be built somewhere in the world. Its only a matter of time and what is next for him in his quest towards his art to be in places for people to feel the wonder of art and architecture.

Note: For best viewing experience, watch larger (click Watch on YouTube). Make sure resolution is set to 1440p HD (settings gear icon on bottom right). Also enable sound.

Why did I name this structure with the word Empyreal? The word evokes something celestial and inspiring awe. What is more awe inspiring than the concept of time? Time is a concept. It looms over everything, yet it has no shape, no structure, no physicality. There are no atoms in time. I think about time a lot. I have downtime when I can’t work. This is a conundrum because time also has no direction, no up, no down, yet humans refer to periods of rest or relaxation or pause in one’s life as downtime. Ok. Where am I going with all of this? During this ‘downtime’, my mind wanders. This is when most of my ideas come to me. During one of these meanderings, I thought about making a structure that spoke to time, not a precise timekeeping device like a clock but something that occupied an isolated realm of contemplation for meditation on its intangible nature. But it would track time, just in a more abstract way.

I remembered learning at Pratt about the Japanese art of wood joinery called Kigumi. It has ancient origins dating back 4,000 years. I haven’t thought about it for many years, but I wasn’t able to sleep, pain was keeping me up, my mind wandered, and it came to me that this would be the solution to build this structure. Its ancient origins emphasize the relativity of human existence. We say 4,000 years is ancient but to time, it is a meaningless number. Predating the iron age, Kigumi is the art of connecting wood with interlocking joints without the use of nails or adhesive. Wood joinery is done with hand tools. This is how Shinto Temples are built. But here, I’m combining the traditional with modern technology; with mass-timber wood members whose wood comes from sustainable forestry and all the cut-outs done with a computer-controlled router which would enable pinpoint accuracy for everything to align properly. The tower has 1,938 horizontal members, 952 vertical members and 4,832 dowels with a height of 82 feet high to the top of the wood and 105 feet to the top of the spire.

The tower is surrounded by a 10-foot-high mound topped by a circular promenade, that like time, has no beginning, no end. To ancient humans, the mound has housed the sacred. Here, a mound houses the tower in its own realm. One enters this realm through a corridor cut through the mound whose splayed walls are a result of them being radially projected from the towers origin point. As you enter this corridor, space compresses and greets you with a portal upon which passing through, space is released. Ramps (handicap accessible) connect the lower plaza to the upper promenade. Moving around this circular ring enables the tower to be viewed in the round.

The morphology of Empyreal Tower emphasizes tectonics, using wood members in a way that allows the structure to be visible and understood. With a grid off wood, a cubic module of four vertical and four horizontal members stack in an arrangement giving its eight inverted rhombus shaped sections. It’s not unlike building with Legos, except the blocks are hollow instead of solid. Horizontal voids in the tower’s forest of wood house an upper and lower glass disk. Embedded in each glass disc is a white arm illuminated with Polymer-Dispersed Liquid Crystals (PDLC) technology. The arm on the lower disk makes one 360-degree revolution per day. The arm on the upper disk makes one 360-degree revolution per year. The movement on the arm of the upper disk is so slow it is imperceptible to the human eye. But with patience, one taking the time to watch the arm in the lower disk which rotates 15 degrees per hour (360 degrees divided by 24 hours per day), this movement is perceptible. A spire rises from the solid cube that supports the upper glass disk, connecting time to the celestial.

The center of the structure has a monumental opening. Open on its four sides, it’s like a giant mouth. Time is like that, like a mouth. It swallows everything in its path. It’s all powerful.

Andrew Reach

Music: Andrew Reach

I’m proud that my husband Andrew Reach is in this exhibition of abstract and geometric art with a group of nine terrific artists (including Andrew) in NE Ohio; Gianna Commito, David Louis Cintron, Mark Howard, Mark Keffer, Catherine Lentini, Natalie Lanese, Ed Raffel, and Susan Squires

From the Artists Archives website:

Tangents: Abstract and geometric Art in Northeast Ohio continues on in this tradition by gathering together a collection of diverse and prolific NEO artists who are choosing to work in a nonrepresentational way. While their various works include forays into: Color, optical interplay, mathematics, space, surface, texture, process, and the built environment, all explore their individual pursuits in geometry and abstraction.

Curator Jennifer Omaitz writes,” The idea for this exhibition grew out of a call to action. In the wake of the COVID 19 Pandemic most regional artworks appeared to explore literal pictorial space in painting and sculpture. Questions circulated about who in the area is making design dominant, non-representational work? Why is making abstract work still important? And how can the process of being an abstract artist lead to greater manifestations of perception? This exhibition aims to excite a deeper interest in geometric art and abstraction in the area and inspire more artists to open up their studio practice… The process of making abstract art occupies a rare space. It combines ways of thinking and making that interact with the temporal; sometimes abstraction is minimal and simplified, sometimes optical, and sometimes part of a collaged or combined language. It slows down or abandons the use of literal shapes and forms, often including ad hoc arrangement and disparate elements to engage the viewer in a space where philosophical questions prevail. The work has the power to share the pictorial space of color and surface with sensuality, metaphor, and resonance.” 

Andrew writes about his work in the exhibition “I have two artworks in the exhibition; QUADRABAR I and PYRALUX IV. These pieces represent a new direction in my work, connecting my roots as an architect with my digital media practice by utilizing 3d modeling to create geometric abstraction. I call this process 3D Derivatives. The idea of an artist being derivative often has a negative connotation, as being imitative of another artist. But I’m using this word in a different context; that of something that is derived from a source, in this case the source being a 3d model. A 3d model can be viewed in many ways, orthographically and in perspective, from the top, bottom and sides, from different angles, rotated… etc. and a 3D model can be rendered with realistic shadows. These characteristics draw me into this process enabling me to expand on my geometric abstraction in ways not possible in 2D. Using the program Blender, I first create a 3d model, add color and study different camera views and lighting to cast shadows that emphasize the forms. I then export renderings to be printed on rigid substrates and cut them out on a router allowing the geometry to reveal its edges.”

QUADRABAR I, 2023
uv inkjet on acrylic/composite aluminum cut out on cnc router
dimensions variable – 47.5″h x 45.5″w overall, edition of 3

Andrew writes, “QUADRABAR I is a visualization in perspective looking directly overhead of a structure of a grid of cubes intersected by bars. They shift up in down, undulating in a wave like formation assembling an implied geographic terrain. Infused with 14 colors plus black and white, it comes alive as an optical tapestry in a symphony of color.”

PYRALUX IV, 2023
uv inkjet on acrylic/composite aluminum cut out on cnc router
dimensions variable – 47.5″ x 47.5″ overall, edition of 3

Andrew writes, “PYRALUX IV is a visualization in perspective looking directly overhead of a structure of 2 back to back square pyramids of stepped blocks color coded with primary colors plus white forming the platonic solid, the Octahedron. The stepped blocks along the edges of the octahedron are recessed, splitting the octahedron into 8 parts of which only 4 parts are visible in this view. The Octahedron’s vertices are color coded in black. A series of smaller blocks nest on the larger blocks increasing in size as they cascade down from the pinnacles.”

Andrew Reach was awarded the Ohio Arts Council’s Artists With Disabilities Access Program (ADAP) Grant for fiscal year 2024.

My husband, Andrew Reach and his wonderful playful artwork HEX LAND II, has been purchased by Colliers International for their new Cleveland office.

Colliers (NASDAQ, TSX: CIGI) is a leading diversified professional services and investment management company. With operations in 66 countries, our 18,000 enterprising professionals work collaboratively to provide expert real estate and investment advice to
clients.

The firm provides services to commercial real estate users, owners, investors and developers; they include consulting, corporate facilities, investment services, landlord and tenant representation, project management, urban planning, property and asset management, and valuation and advisory services.

Click on images to enlarge (except mobile devices)

David Hockney!

Born in 1937, Hockney is a pop art legend whose depictions of pools, cherry blossoms and sausage dogs brighten up the contemporary art scene

When Andrew and I lived in West hollywood California we used to take our dogs to run in Laurel Canyon dog park. At that time David Hockney was having an exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. his art was everywhere. Each piece was magnificent. In one section of the exhibition was work that he did with Xerox Photocopying. As I mentioned before I was a paper man, selling paper ephemera. The Xerox art on the walls, there was one from interview magazine and I believe the other one was from life magazine. The narrative on the wall talked about him going to Laurel Canyon Dog park with his dachshunds. I went to the museum shop to see what they were selling and it was a poster from the show. I decided at that moment, I would search out the magazines that he put art in that were on the wall in the museum that he had made for the masses. It took me awhile but I found them in a store on Venice Blvd that sold all kinds of old magazines and books. It was one of my favorite stores to find paper ephemera. I left the magazines in the car knowing that I had made my mind up that I would take my dogs up to the park in hopes that he would be there with his dogs one day. Sure enough on the first day that I went, there he was. I was so elated that I almost could not contain myself. My dogs first played with his dogs and then I introduced myself. I told him the story I just told you here and he laughed and laughed. he told me to go to the car, get the magazines and he would sign the pages that had his xerox art in them. As he began to sign them, he began to doodle on them with a sharpie adding new detail and then signed them to Andrew and I. He laughed again and said you will be the only person in the world that will have these. I laughed back with him and said I could never afford your work and this is beyond anything I could have imagined. He gave me a hug and my wish came true. I had two pieces signed and doodled by the one and only David Hockney, one of the great modern artists.

Here are the pieces that David Hockney signed and doodled on to both of us.