Behold the BEASTagon
The Beastagon is a 6' display structure with four rotating layers & six sides. Many monstrous combos can be spun from its 24 artworks.
During each annual edition of The Beasting, the two dozen artworks are replaced by new artist contributions. As of fall 2023, 72 artists have created beast pieces at 44 Gaukel.
SPIN THE BEASTAGON
The Beasting’s incredible interactive display of 24 artworks making six interchangeable exquisite corpses lives inside 44 Gaukel Creative Workspace.
44 Gaukel has limited public access but is open to tenants & renters, so opportunities to spin the Beastagon are by appointment only. Contact ArtsBuild Ontario staff to arrange a tour of the facility.
THE MAKING OF A MONOLITH
In March 2021, while talking over The Beasting production with one of the first contributing artists to come to 44 Gaukel to create their beast body part, an irresistible idea came up. Rather than framing the 24 artworks as six curated full beasts, it would be amazing if all six heads, six torsos, six pelvises & six feet pieces could be combined into one display that allowed people to choose any foursome of beast parts they wanted.
This was clearly a mind-stretching & fabulous (& ultimately prophetic) suggestion.
A resulting video conversation with Adam at boko revolved around a very exciting experimental concept. Further email back-&-forth eventually landed on the idea that the display should be something like this:
Following some refinement of the build-out strategy, boko did what boko does.
Above is boko's first crack at a display design that would incorporate four smoothly moveable hexagon sections stacked into a column, capable of showing six artworks at each level.
After we eliminated some optional bells & whistles, the plan narrowed to component parts, hardware & finishing choices. This is Nathanael of boko's hand helping us refine some of those details.
Perhaps the most interesting hidden detail is how the four sections are able to rotate separately, which relies on a customized bracket & roller blade wheels.
The wheels are recessed inside of each hexagonal section, keeping all four sections as tight as possible to present all the artworks as full beast combos...
...and boko did an incredible job of getting the precision & tension just right.
The custom-cut hexagon sections came out beautifully. We couldn’t be more ecstatic about the final result!