Us at DIYP love repurposing old and broken stuff. After all, that’s what DIY is all about. Photographer Fabian Oefner repurposes old cameras in a unique and artistic way, and I absolutely love it. In his project CutUp, he uses resin and a good ol’ saw to turn vintage cameras into amazing, trippy sculptures.
CutUp is a series of technical objects sliced, rearranged, and distorted into a new form. To create his sculptures, Fabian mixes high-end and low-end technologies. The process starts with trapping a camera in resin using a very sophisticated method. It involves vacuum and pressure chambers which use precise atmospheric pressure and temperature. In contrast to that, he uses an old band saw for slicing the objects apart, and this involves nothing but brute force.
This crossover of sophisticated and crude gives Fabian pieces he meticulously polishes by hand. He then reassembles them into their new shape and embeds them in resin again. This gives his sculptures the final shape.
Fabian’s previous work was inspired by the process of destruction and reassembly, and he showed it in his photos before. But with CutUp, he added the third dimension to his work. The artist explains that he deliberately sliced and reassembled still and video cameras. It’s an allusion to his earlier photographic work, where the image made with the camera is the “art” and a camera is merely a tool. But in CutUp, the tool is transformed into a piece of art.
The series currently consists of six sculptures, but Fabian says that it will be expanded into many more in the future. I am definitely looking forward to seeing more, and I hope I’ll be able to see them exhibited. I bet they’re even more impressive in person.
I now leave you to enjoy more photos of these fantastic sculptures, and you make sure to check out Fabian’s work on his website and Instagram.
Very cool and original!