Inner State of Things
Interview by Rosecrans Baldwin
Brittny Badger’s series of disassembled appliances is a delight: a study in how the inner materials of, for example, an ordinary coffee maker can become abstract art. It’s not too far removed from what Kent Rogowski did to a bunch of stuffed animals, though geared more to the graphic design set, or those of us who love grids and graph paper. As Badger notes below, “I am interested in the idea of viewing everyday objects from a completely different perspective. My inspiration comes from anything and everything that is well designed.”
All images © Brittny Badger, all rights reserved.
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Tell us a little bit about the project. Where did the inspiration come from? What were you working towards?
This was my senior thesis project at the Hartford Art School this past year. It was a combination of my two artistic passions, photography and design. I am interested in the idea of viewing everyday objects from a completely different perspective. My inspiration comes from anything and everything that is well designed.
What do the inner workings of these machines say about what they do?
When I started disassembling appliances I was intrigued by the mechanical parts inside; I found them to have much more visual interest in their disassembled state than their original form.
In the beginning stages of this project I was only interested in the form of the parts rather than their functions. As I began to spend more time arranging them and taking more apart, I began really thinking about how the parts work together to make the appliance work.
These photographs are arresting, partially because they’re so wonderfully abstract. Looking at them, do you see the objects you disassembled or the images you built from them?
I stopped seeing the original objects as soon as I took them apart. When I look at the finished product I notice the arrangement of the objects and am reminded of the painstaking process of laying out the separate pieces to make them visually fit together.
What are you working on now?
Right now I am working on getting my web site up and running. I also do some freelance photo and design work. I have a few projects in mind, I plan on getting back into the studio soon.
Rosecrans Baldwin is a founding editor of
The Morning News. His first novel,
You Lost Me There, is coming out soon from Riverhead Books. He most recently wrote the
Letters from Paris column for TMN. His work has elsewhere appeared in
The New York Times,
New York,
The Nation, and on NPR’s All Things Considered. Someday his ashes will be tossed off Mount Desert Island. For more information, check out his
personal site or .
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