I’m going to put one hundred luminescent duck sculptures in a visible location somewhere in Washington, D.C. This post documents the creation of ducks 31 through 36. You can see all the ducks I’ve created so far by going here.
You know you have a serious duck building problem when you begin making shelves to store your duck sculptures. Don’t be distracted by The Creature From the Black Lagoon attacking the swimsuit-clad beauty. It’s a diversion. This blog post is about ducks.
Duck 31, Pink Elephant Duck, was made with flattened bottle caps. For years, I’ve been collecting bottle caps with the idea of turning them into something. The Smithsonian American Art Museum has a bottle cap giraffe. It’s one of my favorite pieces in the city. Also, each time I visit Baltimore’s American Visionary Arts Museum I start thinking hoarding bottle caps for art projects is a good idea.
The name Pink Elephant Duck comes from the scene in Dumbo where the elephant drinks from a spiked trough. However, it looks like Jack London first used the term 28 years earlier.
I made duck 32 from a box of Rene Magritte chocolates a student gave me before the winter holidays. We celebrated Surrealist Sixteenth in my second grade classroom on November 16, and I guess this student paid attention! Turns out duck magritte is also a dish you can cook up.
Duck 33 is stuffed with the innards from an old phone. I named it “Hello? Is it Me You’re Looking For?” after one of the strangest and creepiest music videos of all time.
I made duck 34, Red Menace, out of pieces of an old souvenir stadium cup. (The frightening name could lead us back to further discussion about Jack London.)
The heart motif on duck 35 comes from a pair of toddler-sized socks.
Duck 36 is This Duck Could Save Your Life. It’s made from the rubber gloves I used during my CPR and First Aid class. The tension of the stretched rubber is threatening to pull the tape exterior in on itself. The irony here is that these gloves, the very tools of my life-saving training, may in fact lead to the collapse and destruction of duck number 36. Pause for a minute and think of all of the deep symbolism and complex contradictions in #100DucksDC.
