Caleb Charland

Orange Battery 2012

Recently one Sunday I spent the day at the kitchen table playing with oranges, copper wires and galvanized nails. My hope was that I could make this on going project work with a single piece of fruit. I tried cutting it into slices and wedges but that ever present voice in my head reminded me the SIMPLER IS BETTER. It only seemed logical to use the orange’s natural wedges as the cells for the battery. The wedges are held up-right with an armature of small wooden skewers. The LED is nestled with in the bounds of the orange wedges. I’m still amazed this worked…though it did require 14 hours of exposure.

As an undergrad at MassArt back in 2004 I took a wonderful class on children’s literature.  Final projects involved writing and illustrating our own books. It was so much fun to combine words and images, here’s one from the archive I’m rather fond of.

Words and Image by Caleb Charland © 2004

The Glad Ladder

Once there was a ladder who grew so tall
He could not be used for very much at all
When the ladder was young, all the people in town
Would climb him to be up away from the ground

They’d climb to pick fruits and to shingle their roofs
His rungs became smiles in helpful pursuits
But as he kept growing he got much too tall
No one would climb him for fear they would fall

So the ladder got sadder
And it kept getting badder
He moved far away
Cause it all made him madder

So he was alone to grow and to grow
Above all the trees where the wild winds blow
Up above cities beyond all the clouds
Out where the stars start to shine to the ground

So I asked him one day “Ladder why do you grow?
Are you still a sad ladder, are you out of control?

“No little man I’m now a glad ladder
I know what I now want to do.
Just give me some time, I’m almost through
I’ll be the first ladder to reach to the Moon.”

Details:

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Balloon Clock

Balloon Clock was created in 2008 while working on a commission for Progressive Insurance”s annual report. The theme was Innovation…somehow it occurred to me to attempt to represent time with air. I placed 12 penlights out of frame to online pokie machines reflect off the balloon”s surface. The balloon is mounted to a base made from a water valve. After starting the exposure I released the valve allowing the air to escape. The penlights then served to trace the surface of the balloon during deflation.

Here’s how an idea often begins:

Then due to the magic of photography, this can happen:

Sparkler in Drill 2005

Silhouette with Matches, 2009

Or this:

Becomes this!

Study with Hook, Nails, and String

Reworked some video footage I shot in 2009 or 2010 while studying at SAIC. I never did anything with it. While preparing for an artist”s talk I rediscovered the footage and began to play with the speed and pacing play pokies australia of the material. I”m most amazed with the sound in this work. I suggest wearing headphones, at certain points it feels like breathing, trains and cosmic sputters.

Penumbra in Paint Can 2005

I was recently thinking of this image I made back in 2005. At the time I was working at a photolab and was assigned the task of repainting a few walls. While searching through a cache of old paint cans trying to find a color that matched the paint on the walls I found THIS. When I opened it I was amazed at how it resembled a Petri dish or some bizarre planet’s surface.  Opening the lid was like looking through a telescope. I had that odd sensation that my eyes and my mind could see to where my body could not go. But it was just an old paint can I was peering into. Like eons of plate tectonics the pigments had all separated, encrusted by time.