The Peculiar Diorama

When I documented "The Stockmen" to submit to shows, I didn't submit the entire scenario as I saw it. I didn't do so because it would not have photographed well. I am also maybe slightly embarrassed at the it all being too hokey. But here is the scene I wanted:

The "diorama" (for lack of a better term)  was kind of a 'cowboys and alien robots' scene, perhaps catching a branding or a culling in action. Working class types working around dangerous mechanical animals, and suited up in such a way as to get the job done. In some ways, it's no different from ordinary people putting on suits and ties and entering into the constructed fantasy or alien world of business.

Anyone recall the 'bacteria" things I made a few years ago? I guess they are dog analogues now. Helping out the tentacle wranglers. And that lazy bee/cow now has a bee/calf, or a drone, which I guess they helping keep separate. Which suggests I head into the territory of co-evolved partner species, since, really, for the past 50-100,000 years we aren't just people, but people and dogs. Biology is just amazing fodder for art!

So, looks like I am heading for a merger of the "Masque" and "mechanicule" series as well as maintaining both series separately, and I like that that idea of parallel evolution taking as many divergent paths as possible.

I am working on more figures to be cast in with my class's stuff in April. I already know those figures will be partnered with the dog/bacteria, and they will have some type of robot livestock to manage.

Maybe something more along the lines of sheep robots.

In any case, I have also progressed with ideas about the mechnicules in that they need socket "fasteners" so that they more readily may be leggoed to one another. I even considered making a pair that have plug heads and anal sockets for joining together. For now they just have limb connections like this guy, who I think will be cast in glass.