The Art & The Auto: June 2012

A fun project I've been working on with my fellow college alumni, Eric Freitas. If you don't know the Clockwork of Eric Freitas, you should check it out. Super impressive, laborious and beautiful aesthetic which often gets categorized under steampunk. So, at the end of this month Eric has a few time pieces headed to NYC in SoHo for a show called Steampunkinetics, running from June 23rd to Sept 2nd.

This clock, named Mech. No.7, is a massive piece withover 1000 man hours into making every part. The thing I admire most about Eric's work is that where many people who fall into the steampunk aesthics make many trips around garage sales and Home Depot to find their pieces of construction of art, Eric makes it all himself. At one point during the construction of this clock I was hanging around his shop bs'ing with him and started playing on his baby lathe making screws for this piece to help out, and because of pride, he didn't use them because he wanted to say he did it all himself.

When the concept of the show came up some good 6 months back Eric was very concerned about hanging this near 100 lbs clock on the wall of this gallery. A lot can go wrong if it should happen to fall or not line up on the studs of the gallery. With too much to risk, I offered to build a massive structure for the massive clock.

Where Eric works in brass, my gig is steel. To not compete with the look of the clock, we kicked around many ideas of a simple, overbuilt frame work with vintage casters to help move it around. I kinda wanted to take this much further than he did, but also didn't want competing visuals in the end between the clock and display. The concept visually was that the clock was extracted from some old victorian home by chipping out the wall, then suspended between to I-beams. Overall, this beast is more than 8 feet tall and over 4 feet wide.