Human Flower Project

Monday, January 29, 2007

Gregg’s Roses—Look Again

A California designer brings out the symmetrical mysteries in his garden with crystals and a long, long lens.

New outlook on pink roses via Gregg Payne’s teleidescope

Photo: Commission Impossible

Gregg Payne is the first “collaborative aerosol artist” we’ve known. But it was his “spray roses” that grabbed us, the startling image we spotted on Commission Impossible. (Thank you, Lon!)

A multitalented fellow in Chico, California, Gregg has commercial logos, metal sculptures, and murals to his credit, as well as the largest windchimes in the state of California. (There must at least 100 times as many windchimes in California as guitar pickers in Nashville).  “I’ve made a lot of oversize contraptions,” he writes, “but this one (the teleidescope) is my favorite.” His magic apparatus, made of copper, brass, and stainless steel, has “a six-inch Austrian crystal sphere” as its main lens.

Two-mirror scopes become fountains of radial symmetry. Do snowflakes have consciousness? If so, perhaps this is how the world looks to them.

Jennifer looks through the teleidescope

(near the biggest windchimes in CA, at right)

Photo: Gregg Payne

“First, surface mirrors run the length of the tube and are cut into curves at the ends to wrap around the curve of the lens,” he explains. Will that also work on aphids?  “It has an infinite depth of field from an inch to a mile and never needs focusing.” Unfortunately, what we can’t show you is the teleidescope’s real visual power. It’s big enough to look through with both eyes at once, which, Gregg says, “lets our binocular depth perception see everything in 3-D. Cameras are cool but there’s no comparison to the motion, depth and presence of seeing.”

Devoted to public art, Gregg has been kindly toting his teleidescope around Chico and environs—most recently to Moxie’s Cafe and the Jesus Center—so that others can look for themselves. Gregg thanks Rory Rottschalk, “local philanthropist and promoter of all things cool,” who paid for construction of the teleidescope. What a community effort! and with Gregg’s “contraption” focused on these roses in the garden, what a Human Flower Project, too.