Form meets Function: Richard Prince’s Planters

This past August, one of America’s own backyard sports had its 59th birthday. The wiffle ball is a symbol and icon; pure 1950′s Americana. In fact, every wiffle ball ever made has come out of the original factory in Connecticut. This simple, slotted piece of plastic has woven itself into the architecture of American family life.

Richard Prince, the artist best known for his appropriation of pop culture imagery while discussing  media as subconscious authority on every day life, has done it again. Always inspired by blue collar backyard cliches, Prince approached Polich Tallix with the task of creating metal wiffle balls at 3x the scale of the original object, to use as homes for a variety of different indoor plant life.

In order to recreate the enlarged wiffle ball in metal, we carefully measured and translated the object into a digital surface model that could be read by CNC machining equipment.  The ball was sectioned at it’s hemisphere and milled directly into solid block of aluminum.  Rare earth magnets were inset into both halves so it can be easily opened and closed for watering and plant maintenance. All of the surfaces were hand sanded and finished off with a matte spring green paint coating.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2012 at 2:50 pm. It is filed under Projects and tagged with Richard Prince, sculpture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.