stacks

Stacks

I’ve been making stacks for years. In fact, I made a whole series of works in direct response to stones and other landscaping material that are stacked on wooden pallets. Those pallets are most often made with hardwood from an old growth tree. When I started talking to Natalee seriously about doing a show here, using or responding to the things left on the property was encouraged. Here I find myself looking back almost 15 years to projects at different schools and galleries and places I have visited all over the world. Perhaps more than any part of this show, these pieces represent the idea of the same thing existing in two places at once, my interpretation of quantum entanglement through physical form. The stacked forms harken to sculptural shapes I find myself drawing and coming back to time and time again. In this sense — this is a set of thoughts and moments which have been stacked and restacked again, existing at once both in the past and the present changed by the differential of time. The bent metal layers of six of the forms represent a bit of a material departure for me as they were developed this spring and summer. Further, the crowning stacked elements that are heavily painted are made of steel, matboard, Bondo and roof sealer with acrylic paint. They remind me of something my late friend/teacher/colleague Kirk Mangus called my “cosmic doorstop” series. It’s nice to have an excuse to converse with Kirk again in my mind about art — though I do this all the time — it’s nice also to be referring to my own art again with him as we remain cosmically linked and I miss how his mind worked and saw the world so much. There is that darn entanglement thing again :).