Duplication Effects

While my original intention for this article was to simply expound on the benefits of using insects of various kinds for some artwork, I found, while looking at what I had created, a deeper purpose, that of duplication. There is a subtle power in flooding someone's vision with multiple instances of the same thing over and over again. But I have only my bird and hamsters to thank for this.

It is, of course, inevitable that if you have a bird or anything in the house that eats seed, you are bound to get moths. Even having a porch light on above your stoop or front porch attracts the little flying beasties faster than a bug zapper can zap. While I don't have a bug zapper or even a serviceable fly swatter, I do have bats and cats. The bats, I know are there and the cats, well, they're pets. They take care of the moths when they can and the rest are left up to me. But the supply seems non-stop! Moths, tons of 'em!

Even in our daily life, the over exposure to a simple thing can affect us. Sometimes the repeating instances of a number or a word or a theme (as we perceive it) affects how we think. Sometimes it can create an obsession or a phobia. Sometimes we simply ignore it the best we can. But subconsciously seeing the same thing over and over again does something to us and in art one way to do that is to repeat an object over an over again on our canvas.

Artists vary on whether or not this effect should be subtle or apparent. Modrian for example made his repeating patterns very apparent. The colors were repeated as well as the boxes. Wright's glasswork often uses repeating themes to convey a sense of design coherency. Slightly more subtle is Wayne Thiebaud's "Around the Cake" in which not only are the little pieces of cake sitting around the main cake, but the main cake is round, the plates upon which everything sits is round, and the direction each individual slice is pointing reinforces the round theme.

In my piece, "42 is not the answer, Moth", I am quite blatantly repeating the same object over and over again. It is picture of a seed moth on my wall. This reflects how overwhelmed I feel by the moths that I can't quite seem to rid myself of. This is meant to be in a poster kind of a format so that we see the full image larger than normal, two foot by three foot. Further meanings behind the image other than frustration are left up to you.

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