guggenheim fellowship (excerpt-1996)From 1976 to 1983, my work as devoted to creating a dialogue about abstraction that focused on the relationship between painting and sculpture. Constricted by what I had already invented, I turned away from minimalist strategies, literally breaking my geometrically inspired pieces apart and transforming them into a kind of “found” material. In so doing, I signaled the fact that geometric abstraction had become a piece of history. By breaking my work into shards and combining them into new forms, I made objects that delineated the limits of geometry and ruptured them. This enabled me to invent in a way that appeared both self-conscious and unconscious. From 1983 to 1993, my sculptures were constructed out of parts made from materials such as wood, aluminum, plastic rubber and paint. These parts were geometric in form and abstract in feeling, representing a promise of order and intelligibility. On closer inspection, it became apparent that these parts didn’t belong to any whole, nor did they have any functional purpose. As a collection of found objects, these parts looked mechanically produced, but when combined at odd angles, a different kind of impression began to take form, one of organic growth. |