Photos by Roger Albani.
Photo by Eric Nelsøn.
Work by Rob O’Brien.
And of course Ephemicropolis by Peter Root.
Over the past few weeks I’ve run into a number of artists making awesome things with staples and decided to group them into on big post. All of the images above link to their sources, and there’s much more where these came from.
For anyone visiting Colossal frequently you’ll notice a theme present in dozens of posts here is the idea of multiples, that is things built with thousands of other things, repetition, and process art, where the process of creating something is often more significant than what it produces. This type of work has always fascinated me and based on reactions I get from many of you it seems to universally strike a chord. Of the top 10 most popular posts on Colossal (as we approach the 1,000th post this week!) a full 8 of them deal with multiples in some way. As far as my own personal obsession I attribute it to my taste in music. At the age of five when most kids were probably listening to regular children’s music and nursery rhymes I was already accustomed to—and requesting—music like Isao Tomita, Philip Glass, and Brian Eno (this last link is the first music I ever recall hearing). Music rife with repetitive tones, harmonic chord progressions, and electronic noise, that if manifested physically might look something like these towering staple buildings. So I guess all of this is to say, thanks dad for listening to really weird music so I can justify posting about staples on my obscure art blog.
