Dialogue
1986-1989
Although the individual pieces together form an installation, the components stand apart as sculptural objects. As a child I often visited the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago; there, the mummies fascinated me. The first piece in this series-- a small rubber-wrapped barbell--- was prompted by watching body builders lifting weights at the outdoor gym on Venice Beach.
The pun of recycling bicycle inner tubes aside, the structure of this project and the exclusion of colour in favour of black and white materials allowed for a directed exploration of form. The black rubber simultaneously concealed the armature or object beneath the wrapping while revealing its form. Small white pieces primarily utilize white wax, while a series of large anthropomorphic sculptures--such as Lazaurus, shown here—were made by sanding and stacking layers of plywood according to a full-scale drawing. A series of drawings documented some of the pieces in this installation.
