Nathan Sandberg - OnGrade Studio

While working quite literally with the formal aspects of our built environment, I have become increasingly interested in the intangible aspects of urban life.  Specifically, routes and paths that we follow and the routines that develop as time passes.My contribution to the show is an installation of objects connected to the repetitious nature of life as I see it.  The number of times I find myself performing a task as mundane as reaching for my keys or driving the same three routes to and from work is perplexing.  As I make these trips I observe others doing exactly the same thing and often wonder if they realize, as I do, how much time they spend on these tasks. As an artist I appreciate the accidental arrangements of texture, form and color that are experienced everyday in cities everywhere.  As an architect, my father designs buildings.  I prefer to take aspects of many different structures and assemble them into singular pieces of kilncast glass sculpture. Time can be recorded as notches on a stick, rings within a tree trunk and ticks on a circle. In the piece Tally I attempt to document a repeating activity that has developed into a routine. Grade stakes- often used on construction sites to demarcate the rise and fall of elevation- are used as counting units marking the recurrence of
events.  The entire group represents an amount of time that has since past and makes note of a recurring activity.