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Steve Emmons is in the e-mail lounge of Memorial Union, surrounded by 250 white shipping boxes, when two passersby stop to ask him a question.
“What are you building?” they ask.
“Minimalism,” he replies, with a touch of irony.
It’s one answer out of many Emmons gives as he constructs the nearly 7-foot-tall cube out of the empty shipping containers. Other interpretations include a statement on the uselessness of shipping materials in the age of the Internet – hence the e-mail lounge location.
But it’s the first answer that hits closest to the truth. Emmons is a student in Sculpture II with Greg Ondo, and the assignment was to build a sculpture that interacts with a public space. Emmons wanted to build something too big to be useful.
Emmons wanted to get a lot of materials – cheap. He thought back to a prank he pulled on a friend: He filled a dorm room solid with six boxes worth of boxes, obtained for free through the US Postal Service. For his project in the Union, Emmons had 10 boxes of boxes, which he and four friends folded in the course of an hour. The boxes add a surreal back story to the piece: a bunch of boxes, shipped in boxes, arranged to form a giant box.
“It’s just kind of weird that the post office goes through all that trouble to ship them to you,” Emmons says. The top of the structure was made up of the boxes the containers were shipped in, making use of every piece of material.
“The most important part of art is that you can laugh at it,” Emmons says, from deep inside the box fort he’s finished.
“It’s comfortable but claustrophobic,” Emmons says. Isolated in a cardboard fort, he’s immune to the responses of people as they pass by. The night custodian glances at the box with an expression of sour concern. Nearby, an explosion of cheers emerges from a group of students playing Ms. Pac-Man, who later pass by the box with quizzical looks.
Then it’s time to take the box – or boxes, depending on your viewpoint – down. And, whenever you have a large structure made out of cardboard, you’re going to have the idea to spend some time busting out of the thing. That’s what Emmons and his helpers did.
“When it’s just a bunch of boxes, I don’t get it. But when it’s busting out of a bunch of boxes, I get it,” said Emily Spahr, a student who helped Emmons put the box together. Emmons is fine with that – he’s in it to make something fun, not something for people to “live their life by.”
Emmons has made more traditional sculptures – one, which he describes as a “terrifying steel sculpture,” points to one angle on art he’s adopted: the punk rock thing.
“I’d have to say my work is most often a reaction to growing up trying to rebel against everything and being a punk kid,” Emmons said. “There’s only so much trying to be different you can do before you have to submit to the fact that there really isn’t any way to truly be your own man.”
Correction: Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated Greg Ondo’s name as Greg Ando.
Bangor Daily News