Michelle Allard's abstract sculpture, Extruded Expanded at YYZ* in Toronto is contemporary, eerie, and resonant. The material is crap: an industrial styrofoam that is presently used pretty much everywhere, a popular substance in this short phase of planet earth, this blink of an era in which humans swarm around building far too many things and messing with the chemistry of life itself. Front on, the sculpture looks something like a cityscape, a blank, abandoned, snowy icon of a cartoon post-apocalypse. The hard-edged shapes repeat, invoking fractals, crystals and other natural mechanisms. Together, their angled bulk is like a geological formation, a shifted tilted bed of rock that now juts up when it once lay flat. The cold blue flourescent light gives everything the cast of futuristic fiction and dispassionate display. All this from bits of styro-crap, cut and glued and left to tilt.
(Follow the link for a picture and Crystal Mowry's excellent essay. *And, yes I work there, but I'm in publishing not programming. Besides this is my blog and I'll write what I want.)
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Michelle Allard's abstract sculpture, Extruded Expanded at YYZ* in Toronto is contemporary, eerie, and resonant. The material is crap: an industrial styrofoam that is presently used pretty much everywhere, a popular substance in this short phase of planet earth, this blink of an era in which humans swarm around building far too many things and messing with the chemistry of life itself. Front on, the sculpture looks something like a cityscape, a blank, abandoned, snowy icon of a cartoon post-apocalypse. The hard-edged shapes repeat, invoking fractals, crystals and other natural mechanisms. Together, their angled bulk is like a geological formation, a shifted tilted bed of rock that now juts up when it once lay flat. The cold blue flourescent light gives everything the cast of futuristic fiction and dispassionate display. All this from bits of styro-crap, cut and glued and left to tilt.
(Follow the link for a picture and Crystal Mowry's excellent essay. *And, yes I work there, but I'm in publishing not programming. Besides this is my blog and I'll write what I want.)
- sally mckay 7-13-2004 8:28 am