 |
|
|
 |
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
Stockpile is a large structure comprised of objects and materials suggesting early-American colonial craft reenactment and reproduction. Among these sculptural emblems of patriotism, I have included such familiar forms as crates, barrels, and baskets, pieces of unfinished wood furniture for domestic interiors and campsites, a spinning wheel, flags, drums, canteens, wooden guns, and many other items held together precariously like a stockpile of raw materials poised at a tipping point. I see this work as akin to a campsite or period room turned in on itself, in which objects for the home and battlefield form a collected pile of loot, perhaps held in reserve for use at a time of shortage or emergency.
In my use of primarily unfinished wood, this sculpture suggests a blank canvas upon which to project imagery or imagination and also a campfire or funeral pyre. The objects appear to be new and ready to be used, like props for a reenactment. Their accumulation as a sculptural mass of this scale also evokes a sense of anxiety, if not obsession. Aside from the question of how these objects are to be performed and by whom, this work also asks "Who made this?" Many of the items embedded in the piece were in fact made in Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, India, Brazil, and China, bringing these colonial reproductions full circle from their historical referent to current issues of American mass consumption and outsourced labor, a form of colonialism reenacted in the present. |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Stockpile 2011 unfinished wood and mixed media 12 x 18 x 18'
|
"Bay Area Now 6," Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Photo credit Phocasso/J.W. White. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
