frottage | playscape

frottage _ The premise for this studio began with inspiration taken from the "frottaged" artwork of artist Max Ernst [1891 - 1976]. "Frottage" [originally derived from the French word "frotter"; meaning to rub] was used by the artist as a means of using different rubbings of textures to create an image. Ernst originally created the process when on a rainy August evening in 1925 when the rough-hewn floorboards of his hotel room caught his attention, in a spur of the moment gesture he began making a series of sketches by rubbing his black charcoal pencil over the paper recreating the texture he was encapsulated by. He would later recount how he was amazed by the "sudden intensification" of his visionary capabilities and the "hallucinatory" result of the dark areas contrasting with the delicately lit half dark areas of the drawing. As we began the project the students were tasked with creating their own methodology of creating frottage and to begin analyzing the work of Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck, known for his creative approach to the design of children's playgrounds in post-war Amsterdam. After the creation of a frottaged "object" and "landscape", the class visited the site in the Ohio City neighborhood of Cleveland. After taking photographs and rubbings from the site, the students were to create a conceptual site map from their data. This conceptual drawing was to act as the main driver for the creation of the playground "playscape" and a one-room schoolhouse. my interpretation of frottage was to layer multiple geometric "rigid" textures and collapse them together creating a new "flattened" image. My thought process for the frottage object began with the creation of a background layer; consisting of a light gridded texture for the foreground "object" to be placed upon. My goal was to take a very recognizable object and extract from it the essence that made it recognizable in the first place. In this series, I utilized the texture to dictate the forms created by the rubbing, tiles remain in a gridded pattern, while the rubbings from the metal wire retain their rigid, bar-like appearance. Utilizing elements extracted from the frottage rubbings taken from the site, the process was now digitalized, rather than using analog methods of layering and creating images from textures we were now able to digitally combine, collapse, and create images based off a multitude of frottaged "data". I began by setting a series of rules for myself to follow, with the overall idea being that there would be a series of informational layers, each representing different data extracted from the site flattened together to create an abstract 2-dimensional representation of the area. From this, the final image exists as an amalgamation of the site topography plan, digital and analog site frottage representing the vegetation present on the site, erasures representing the playground "clearings" I intended to propose, and icons representing the important views from the site towards the city; represented by the digitally abstracted frottage version of the city skyline.