Elk Creek Burn: Burned Tree
PF:Why was it important that the tree was burned? You see that in this sculpture more than anywhere else because you still have the charred wood. What about that spoke to you?
MB:I think that these pieces function for me as something like a host body where the burned tree which has been taken from the region where this narrative was told, is then opened up, and the molten material is poured through the tree, the inside of the tree is then transformed, and it emerges out in a transformed and sculptural state. So, the tree in that way becomes a host body for this guest language; so I think I was thinking both in terms of the firearm as a kind of structural model, but also a way of making the Redoubt project site-specific and taking a form from that landscape and transforming it.

Redoubt is in many ways a portrait of central Idaho, and the forest fire situation there has really become a part of its character. The fires burn every summer there, and a lot of the locations in the film are in burns. And so during the filming, a lot of these trees were becoming more and more interesting to me as forms. So after the filming was finished, we went back and harvested these trees and brought them to the foundry in Washington State and started working with them.

Elk Creek Burn: Orientation, Surface, and Material
PF:In the film, the trees are mostly vertical and some diagonal, but mostly upright. And in the exhibition, the sculpture is very horizontal and spans the space of the gallery in a really insistent way. What did that change in orientation mean to you?
MB:I think that there are several languages at play here. One of them is the landscape, and I wanted for these works to function simultaneously as landscapes, as kind of firearms, as kind of chemical transformations.
I was also interested in taking the language of the tactical and colliding it with this more kind of chaotic, organic language that you have in the casting in, and around, the tree. The bases were made after these rifle rests which are used to calibrate the optics on a firearm. I wanted for that kind of overdetermined technical, tactical language to be in strong contrast to the more explosive energy of the tree and the casting.
PF:The cast forms on the surface really function almost topographically; there is a kind of landscape on the surface. Mysterious landscape of metals intertwining and exploding in different ways that becomes a sort of landscape unto itself as well.
MB:Another starting point with this work was to take the metals present in ammunition: brass, copper, and lead, and to marbleize them. A lot of the initial experimentation in making this work was to try to create a situation where the different metals could be poured simultaneously and each metal could retain its character without becoming an alloy. And that was done by pouring the metal into a kind of a mud or slurry of bentonite clay and water, and it gave the metals isolated pockets to cure without mixing.

Basin Creek Burn: Material and Process
PF:We’re standing in front of Basin Creek Burn and this was a complete burnout, yes?
MB:Yeah. The tree is gone from this piece. And the technique we used to make this piece was slightly different than with Elk Creek Burn.
The form of the tree, which had this dominant spiral figure in the cracking and grain, was used to give the exterior surface of the piece its form.
The core of the piece was made by splitting open the tree and using a computer-driven mill to carve out a negative space inside the tree in the same form as the outside of the tree. So a kind of miniaturized replica of the exterior surface was made inside the tree. Those two halves were then put back together, and holes were bored into that core from the outside of the tree to allow the metal eventually to leak out to the exterior of the tree and cast that spiral surface on the outside.

Basin Creek Burn: Surface
PF:The surface detail is really incredible; it’s so detailed and nuanced as this kind of hive-like structure that is more visible than I imagine it even was on the original tree.
MB:It’s a combination of both the detail of the outside of the tree, which was molded in sand, and then in other places it’s an artifact from the casting process and the leakage of metal that’s passing through the cracks in the burned tree. So that kind of lacy filigree is made by way of leaking metal, and we were starting to see this in the testing process, and it became more interesting to me as an organic form of camouflage that could start to create an interesting relationship between the works that use a more explicit technical form of camouflage, and the burned tree itself.

Electroplating: Process
MB:In the film, the engraver is seen drawing the landscape, drawing the wildlife in the landscape, and eventually coming upon Diana and the Virgins and drawing them.
He’s engraving into a copper plate, and at the end of each day he takes his plate to the electroplater, a woman who lives in a trailer by a river and who has an electroplating lab in her trailer.
She takes the plates and subjects them to the electroplating bath where the image he’s engraved starts to abstract, it starts to fill with a copper deposit. The plate is put into a bath of sulfuric acid with copper sulfate in solution. A block of copper is put on one side of the tank and the plate is placed on the other. The block of copper is dissolved in the acid and the plate is charged with one pull of electricity, and the copper block is charged with the other.
The copper in solution is then attracted to the exposed line on the plate, and then builds up and grows on that line. So, what started in that narrative was then carried through this process with multiple iterations of the same image. The initial engraving was scanned and duplicate copies were made using a laser engraver, and those duplicate plates were then subjected to different electroplating conditions.
There are five states made from each engraving; and each of these states is subjected to a different set of conditions in the electroplating bath. First, each progressive state is plated for a longer duration and so the buildup of copper is greater. There is also a way in which the acid starts to eat away at the ground on the plate, which is made of an asphalt material, and the dots that you see in the plate are where the acid has eaten through that ground and the copper then finds its way onto the copper plate and creates these small nodules.
There are also some choices that are more experimental in the way that the chemistry was altered. And chemicals used to keep the copper in an even distribution in the tank were removed and so the copper buildup started to form more aggressively on the edges of the frame and on the corners.
We also started experimenting with changing the proximity of the charged block of copper with the plate by moving that block closer to the plate. The texture would change in the electroplating. It would start to burn the material. In some of the later stages of the progressions, you can see a darker color, a burning, which happens when the charged anode is moved closer to the charged cathode.

Virgins: Materials & Process
PF:Looking at Virgins, the copper has such a stunning presence. It’s this kind of drape and incredibly rich color.
MB:This sculpture has one tree cast in brass, and one tree cast in copper. After carrying through these experiments with marbleizing the metals and combining them, I was interested in making a work that would separate the two.
So, this piece was made with the intention of articulating some of the elements I had been working with in the Basin Creek Burn and Elk Creek Burn works more explicitly. The root balls were kept with these two trees, and this notion of camouflaging was taken to a more literal place. I took the two camouflage patterns worn by the Virgins in the film, and that camouflage pattern was tooled into a casting made from the outside of the tree. Those forms were then cast in wax and draped over the trees to create these skins in the two camouflage patterns.
The cores of these trees were cast with the same method used in Basin Creek Burn, where a digital scan from the outside of the tree was used to cut a negative space inside the tree using a computer-driven mill; so a casting was then made inside the tree using the tree itself as a mold.
One of the things that happened with this casting method that became more interesting to me was the way that the metal would burn the wood as it was passing through the tree and create a char texture on the interior surface of the mold in the moment before the metal would chill. So, all of that texture that you see in the core of the tree is made in that moment before the metal is able to harden.

Virgins: Movement and Forms
PF:With a sculpture we were looking at before, Elk Creek Burn, there’s an explosion at the end and the root balls almost seem like an explosion at the beginning.
I also think of the two figures in the film dancing together and how they become kind of one being with two parts at many moments in the film, and that seems to be happening in a really wonderful way in this sculpture.
MB:Yeah, this piece does address some of the kind of choreographic ideas that happened in the film and specifically with the Virgin characters.
PF:One thing you are making me think just now, is the sort of contact between the metal and the tree, and the kind of way that that transformation happens. There’s something about the relationship of the two Virgins in particular in the film that sort of changes each other in relation to the overall narrative. I mean, they are a unit.
MB:Contact improvisation interested me in the way that a martial art was sort of the starting point for that notion in how the kind of aggressive energy from one body is transformed by the other and that there’s no lead in contact. That the two characters are trying to create a kind of balance through their exchange of energy. And much in the way that the Virgins in Redoubt are playing out critical moments in the narrative before they happen, at times, or they’re like a chorus repeating those actions after they happen; but they’re playing both roles. They’re playing the role of the predator and the prey.
I think contact improvisation became a really interesting way of thinking about how that could be translated to movement and to dance, and this idea of dissolving the difference between the predator and the prey, and approaching the hunt as an aspect of the landscape. Something that lives in that place and by way of the form of abstraction, these different forms of energy could coexist without a kind of hierarchy in that space.
PF:Do you want to talk about the orientation of this sculpture at all? It’s propped up on this triangular form. Does that have to do with your interest in optics?
MB:I mean it’s a bipod, which is a conventional form used in propping up firearms. But it’s also a way, in a very sort of simple way, of supporting something; a kind of provisional structure in a kind of forested area where large poles like this are lashed together in a very simple way, and are used to prop up something even quite heavy, in a very simple way.

Cosmic Hunt: Abstraction and Layering
PF:The Cosmic Hunt pieces are probably the most abstract works in the exhibition.
MB:I would say that they are certainly the most layered. I was interested in making a group of works that approached the narrative in a more universal way rather than an explicit way. Most of the electro plates were generated during the filming itself as plein air engravings. In cosmic hunt stories, the hunter, or the hunted, is at the end of the story sent into the sky, and becomes part of a constellation of stars. I wanted these Cosmic Hunt works to function something like skyscapes.
PF:There’s a kind of permanence implied in the transformation to a constellation that’s a permanent form of a story that’s unfolding, and the component parts of the story are layered into the image that we see. Right? How did the materials function here?
MB:Well, much in the way that the copper and brass have been used in sort of varying ratios and different proportions from work to work. The Cosmetic Hunt series has this horizon line between copper and brass which changes in each frame. And the way that the copper electroplating was handled in these was slightly different than in the electric plates. The Cosmic Hunts was a kind of an amalgamation of all of the different techniques that had been explored. Where parts of the image are hand engraved, parts of the image which are more kind of patterned are cut by a laser; and then other parts are obliterated by wiping away the asphalt ground. And there’s a color range in these that comes from a Patina created by using a sulfuric vapor, creating a kind of gradation of color.

Cosmic Hunt: Frame
PF:Do you want to talk about the frame. It’s so striking.
MB:Yes, the frame is milled copper and brass and this sort of rail that runs around the frame is called a picatinny rail and it’s used on firearms to mount the optics and other attachments. It’s the same form that sits on the top of the receiver on Basin Creek Burn and Elk Creek Burn.
PF:Is the profile of the frame related to the picatinny rail but is the curve or the profile progressive in anyway or is just the copper half and the brass half?
MB:I mean one of things I was interested in with this frame, is to make the tolerances in the profiles precise on the level of tactical equipment or firearms, to sort of bring it into that level of resolution. So the profile where the brass meets the copper has a kind of an S-profile. It’s kind of fitting that you would see in the joint between the shell casing and the bullet and that sort of level of precision where the two materials are meeting together.
In the Cosmic Hunt works, the brass region is always sitting at the bottom and the copper at the top. The starting points for these works was the image of a round of ammunition standing on the end where the shell casing would sit at the bottom and the copper jacketed bullet would sit at the top. Through the series of Cosmic Hunt works, the proportions change between the copper and the brass, and like with the mixture of these two metals through the four sculptures, I wanted the proportions to shift, and for its concrete relationship to ammunition to become more abstract and for that difference to be dissolved by way of the abstraction in the image.

Diana: Sculpture
PF:Looking at Diana, the surface is so incredibly complex. Where did this fit in your overall thinking about the narrative and the different sculptures? This is probably the most complex of all of the sculpture in the exhibition I would say.
MB:I wanted this work to have a technical explicitness that the other works don’t have, and in that way that the Diana would sit at the end of this progression from the progression which starts with Elk Creek Burn and passes through various forms of balance between the technical language and the more organic language.
I also wanted Diana to have a kind of explosive power that in some ways is in contrast to her portrayal in the film. One of the ways that Diana in the film was directed, was to execute her task in a somewhat ambivalent way. And I wanted to deal with some of the contradictions in the character of Diana in that way. The way in which she is the Goddess of the Hunt while at the same time she is killing the animals she considers to be sacred. And there’s a kind of an ambivalence in the narrative of Diana that I find really compelling. And so I wanted this piece to express that in some ways.
PF:The base here seems perhaps the most hybrid of all your bases for these sculptures. It’s both a base for the firearm but also it looks like a kind of telescope base. It seems to have a real direct relationship to seeing.
MB:Yeah, for sure. I think much in the way that the character of the electroplater in the film is a kind of a conduit to the sky, that I wanted for that sort of aspect of the kind of cosmic to be present in these works more or less constantly. That there was always something in the language pulling it away from the Earth, away from the tactical as-in the machinery of the hunt and toward the optics used to look at the sky. And even formally, I think to try to abstract the color and the geometry of a more galactic or planetary set of visual cues.

Diana: Plate
PF:We’re looking at the Diana electroplates and you made the decision to have Diana appear at different spots in the exhibition and kind of be a presence across the different galleries. Do you want to say anything about that?
MB:The installation was organized around this idea of following a progression. Both sculpturally and pictorially. And I think with the electroplates, they’re a certain series which can function in a more linear way like the landscape Bay Horse, which is hung together as one group whereas the portrait of Diana, I wanted to keep separated but still function as a progression through the exhibition.
PF:One of the striking things to me about this progression is that the eyes, Diana’s eyes, become more pronounced or seem to have more of a direct connection to the viewers as the plates progress. So where as some of the lines become more obscure as the copper grows, the eyes become that much more powerful and direct. The gaze feels more direct as it progresses. Which seems like an interesting connection to your interest throughout the project and how we see in optics and the kind of aiming of firearms and looking up into the sky.
MB:Also I think, Diana has an enigmatic nature and I think her gaze in this portrait is for me functioning that way. I wanted to keep that sense of contact with her eyes so as the subsequent plates were plated, I started to mask the area of her face with a resist which kept the copper from depositing there. So it kept the resolution in her eyes intact while the rest of the plate was going more abstract.
PF:I think the film and the sculptures really function as one endeavor. I think the interesting tension is that there are many progressions within the project. So, a series of electroplates is a progression. The sculptures function as a progression. The film unfolds in time and a narrative progression. But there really isn’t a kind of beginning, middle and end. It’s much more cyclical. And that relates to the specific subject matters of the work as well. The idea of the landscape and the forest as a kind of cyclical system where the fires actually generate future regrowth or the tension between the destruction and regeneration in the fires or also in the hunt, right? Where the Diana figure is both pursuing the prey and also seeing it as sacred. So there’s this kind of tension throughout.
MB:I agree it’s one endeavor. It’s not a progression in and of itself, but there’s many progressions within the work.