Eboni Lacey 	
11/06/2010 
Professor Neil Lawley 
3D Design 
			
One of Michael Rees’s most recent pieces is a construction of distorted body parts placed together in an art formation. This piece is named Putto, and was created numerous times for public attractions in multiple places. These places include Kansas City, Missouri, Hereford Germany, and Ridgefield, Connecticut. All of these pieces contain the same material and distorted human form, yet involve different body parts such as fingers placed on top of baby feet or fingers on the top and bottom of a sausage-like body with no head. Each Putto contains a two minute video animation which is located on a screen right behind it. To create an accurate animation, the 3D sculptures were built in Cinema 4D and then rendered in Maya 3D. In the animation, Putto flips acrobatically creating a complex movement that is extremely different to a movement of a normal human. 
The Putto sculpture is Kansas City is located at the corner of 13th street between Broadway and Central. The piece is apart of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Its dimensions are 212 by 122 by 175 inches.  In feet that is around 17 by 10 by 14.   Putto was made in 2005 and contains small fingers on top of larger fingers placed on legs with feet. Putto was made out of luminore iron which is placed on fiberglass over expanded polystyrene foam and steel. To make Putto, Rees isolated a three-dimensional snapshot from the animation and made it into an object. He exported the animation as an .obj file and fine-tuned it using different engineering software.  Rees then created foam parts using Computer Numerical Control. The foam parts were then shipped to New York, where they were glued together and coated with fiberglass resin. The surface of the sculpture was sanded smooth, and primed with a special epoxy.  Finally, an iron surface was sprayed on the sculpture giving it a brownish, red color.  
From a personal standpoint, I have seen this piece numerous times while living in Kansas City. At first I thought it was an extremely weird piece and had no response to it. It was just something I continued to drive by along the side of the road. I even thought it was some kind of artistic gimmick for the audience to donate something, like many other artists do along the plaza every year. After actually researching this piece, I think it is awesome simply because the piece confuses me in a way. It is something so different and embraces the new digital media which art will eventually evolve into. I think it’s extremely creative to take an animation and actually make it into a three-dimensional sculpture. The only thing I would like to see next is the three-dimensional sculpture actually moving like the animation played on the screen. That would be genius.