The new series we started this week at LYF is called My Messed Up Family and to be honest a lot of what I’m leaning towards design wise for the stage has been more general purpose than series stylized. I enjoy those heavily stylized pieces but it’s kind of odd when your stage is branded for something and you’ve got another event going on in your auditorium!
I’ve always been intrigued by the concept of using the stage as your canvas for abstract art. I’ve seen stage designers like Jason Widney do art pieces with some abstract meaning that just look plain awesome. So it was my desire to bring some art and beauty to the stage with this feature while keeping a little bit of abstract meaning. I tossed around a few ideas pre-Christmas to build some light columns out of some coroplast and 1x2s and was met with a little bit of resistance because it didn’t fit the theme as well. So back to the drawing board of my mind and I began to build upon the idea of using basic geometric shapes to build a complex thought on stage. We were talking about the foundations of family, the basic building blocks if you will. So the idea took off to build intertwined cubes.
Still using similar material to what I was going to build the columns out of I started figuring out scale etc. The 1×2′s come in 8ft lengths so I figured that cutting them in half and creating 4 foot cubes would be plenty epic enough to fill the stage. Now how many to actually build? they’re big! I settled on thirty which seemed like a daunting number but realistically once they were all hung interconnected was just about how many i needed. Now how to construct them. As you look through the photo set on flickr you’ll notice the first sides of the squares are interlocked. I used a half inch straight router bit and routed each piece of those with a notch so that the pieces set inside each other. This helped add strength since they are so large. I placed some wood glue and then used a nail gun with finishing nails to hold them together. After the glue set they were solid. The side pieces were the iffy ones. the router bit I bought did not fit my router so instead of routing out an inch and a half notch and applying the support on the sides 
I had to do a half inch notch in the top which was not quite as stable as I’d hoped but with wood glue and nails I achieved enough stability that they could be hung. I left one rung out of each cube so that I could interlock them all together then used the nail gun to finish them off.
Tie line worked great to hang the majority of them. I used safety cable to hang the first few to give a stronger base.
The hardest part after getting the first row hung was figuring out whether to go symmetrical or not. I chose not symmetrical and after that it all started falling together rather quickly.
This project took about two days from start to finish and material cost was around $200 as long as you have the router, chop saw etc.
