I
started three years ago having spent most of my life in front of a keyboard as a reporter writing about
vehicles including vintage, classic, exotic, racing cars. See my
parallel site for insight into that world.
Progression into art came when I took what I was using every day, a keyboard, and turned it into something else. Can’t call it repurposing as there is no purpose to the Quirky B’s but for art’s sake. Some are ironic, some are beautiful, all are quirky. I am not doing functional art. Although they embody function, these boards will never type again.
Ottawa is a government town and we rise and fall with the
output from thousands of keyboards every day. Taking a familiar object
and adjusting it in our view has the power to perturb, sometimes, to
mystify, always to delight.
When a predictable object, something with which people are
familiar, takes on a different face, such as Warhol’s Campbell soup
cans that are perfectly rendered but empty, content devoid, it is the
state of souplessness that becomes exemplified. Warhol creates cognitive
dissonance and dissipates it in an instant.
Cans in people’s larders do not become art yet people
accept his illustrated version and celebrate it. People rationalize and
ratify Warhol’s art even as he crows that art is anything he can get
away with.
Using the common keyboard as a canvass or spring board
for
creation marries form and function with significance and implication
the result of which is, well, quirky.
I think of quirky in terms of synonyms: eccentric, odd/awed,
peculiar, strange, upbeat, unconventional, individual, extraordinary
and, even, weird and wonderful. | 
