Object Development - Todd McLellan

When thinking about my Object idea, I wanted to display a load of different phones and a few other gadgets that represent themselves as devices that can quite easily steal our time. Phones are obviously a classic example of this with their web-enabled capabilities, but there are a few others. When thinking about these objects, I wanted to display many in an ordered manner. When looking for inspiration, I stumbled upon Todd McLellan. Todd was born in Canada and was brought up encouraged to do photography by his Dad. He graduated from the Alberta's College of Art & Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2002 and since then he has done a lot of commercial work. Some personal work of his has most definitely intrigued me though. He has done a series of photographs where he dissembles objects and lays them all out in an ordered manner. The idea behind this seems to show a passion for how things work, a desire to see what makes up these objects - among them is a Pentax camera. 

If you look closely at all the tiny parts, you can see he has deconstructed it right down to the smallest of pieces, even the bolts are individually placed on the canvas. This shows a great attention to detail, you could even go on to say he was almost obsessed with seeing every part of the object to specify exactly what it fully consists of. This obsession ties in quite nicely with what I'm trying to trying to achieve with my own project, although there are differences obviously - the image above shows his own obsession, whereas my objective is to reveal people's obsession with technology. Regardless, this organised and systematic approach to displaying everything is something which inspires me. What you may also notice is that the smaller parts are mostly on the left hand side of the image, the main camera body parts are in the middle, and the larger more cylindrical shapes are on the right - this shows a great amount of order, when previously there must have been a well thought-out yet destructive process to get it down to all of these parts - to then re-organise it into something else. It's the idea that it can transform from one piece of art in the form of product design, and then through a destructive process, it transforms into a completely new piece of artwork - that artistic transformation through creative input is fascinating.