Discussion

This is a space to share your thoughts about the piece, your feelings about the 3D aspect to the piece, or whatever else this piece made you feel or think about.

Here’s what we wrote as an introduction to our subscribers:

Every season there is a moment that we fall in love.  We build relationships with these pieces as we produce them and work intimately with the artists.  This connection sometimes starts as early as the proposal or as late as the interview, but without fail, we fall.  This season, it was during a very rainy March evening over margaritas.  When Matthew Cella brought out a 3D sketch that he’d been working on for us to look at, our eyes crossed, we blinked, and that’s when we knew.

Map (256 + 128)³ requires you to actively look.  It throws you into a whirlwind of visual confusion but rewards your struggle.  Don’t give up if you don’t see the delicate, layered, and buzzing forms at first; it usually takes a little while for the 3D figures to appear. But when order arises from Cella’s neon “nastiness”, we get giddy with the ability to see differently.

Matt Cella is a maker.  That evening in March the table was covered in sketches, shrinky dinks, temporary tattoos, books, plastic and metal samples. In addition to creating the new collage for your print, he also designed the logo for the glasses, the golden ticket certificate, and hand carved the stamp for the edition numbers on the back.  When we called him to ask for the font he used for the certificate he laughed and said, “yeah, a font would be nice”; he had hand drawn the letters pixel by pixel.

Michael Bianco touches on this attitude towards making as he connects Cella’s work to the theories of the Japanese craft philosopher Soetsu Yanagi.  He notes that Cella embodies the role of a patern-maker by adorning his physical creations with distillations of his visual world.  The main difference is that Yunagi’s surroundings were natural whereas Cella’s world is a digital recreation.  We’re very fortunate and proud to feature Matt’s work.