Between Flight and Entrapment

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Vol. 34 No.9
A publication of the
International Sculpture Center
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Departments
Features
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Itinerary
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Forum : Deutsche Bank: A Best Practice For
Corporate Art Engagement? by Robert Preece
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ISC News
The Art of Corruption : Darren Waterston's Filthy Lucre by Twylene Moyer
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Dean Snyder: Between Flight and Entrapment by jenn joy
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Caroline Achaintre : Aesthetic Osmosis by Kathleen Whitney
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Eun lin Jang: A Natural History of Sculpture by jonathan Goodman
Reviews
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Maren Hassinger: Winds of Change by Rebecca Dimlmg Cochran
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The Oneness of an Endless Universe: A Conversation with Mariko Mori by jan Garden Castro
Malnz, Germany : Lois Weinberger
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Miami : Christina West
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Sarasota, Florida : "Re:Purposed"
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Chicago : Dorothy Dehner
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Boothbay, Maine: George Sherwood
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Boston: Sarah Bliss, Rosalyn Driscoll, and
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)ames Wyness
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Springfield, Massachusetts : Gloria Garfinkel
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New York: Barbara Edelstein
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New York : Anya Gallaccio
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New York: Alko Hachlsuka
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New York : Martha Walker
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Richmond, Virginia : Myron Helfgott
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Buenos Aires: Nicola Costantino
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London : Pascale Marthine Tayou
On the Cover: Darren Waterston, Filthy
Lucre (detail), 2013-14. 01l, acrylic. and
gold leaf on wood, alummum, fiberglass.
and ceramic, With audio and lighting,
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approx. 146 x 366 x 238m. Photo: John
Tsantes, courtesy FreeriSackler.
Sculpture November 2015
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Offspring , 2001 . Sewn and inflated rawhide and
turned wood , 96 x 57 x 57 in .
equipment." It contained a black plastic
garbage bag wrapped around a very damp
heap of rawhide. Left to soak in my bathtub (per the instructions) until Snyder's
arrival, the impossibly slippery material
swelled in weight and dimension until
he came to San Francisco from Bennington, Vermont, where he was teaching
at the time, to dry it out with a vacuum
and insert a series of wooden dowels
into the holes along the surface.
Offspring (2001) evolved into a strange
bulbous creature that grounded an exhibition of alternating tattoo drawings and
taut rawhide forms, including Organ
(1998). a slouching instrument or partially
deflated cushion punctured by ebony
limbs alluding to sonic tension or abject
humor. The material dissonance draws
out a fetishistic and poetic attachment
to materials, as ebony and rawhide touch
or bent ash weaves into an epic sphere
covered in iron rings (Lubber, 1994). As
Snyder explained to me in 1998, "As a
craftsman, I revel in the joy of working
with materials and exploring traditional
processes. As a poet, I work very hard to
transform my sense of tragedy and sadness into comic absurdities:·
When rendered with a tattoo needle
on rawhide stretched over a Plexiglas
frame, Snyder's drawings literally glow
as the skin casts an amber illumination
beneath the etched image. Continuously
drawn, the images belie the speed of the
A shrewd manipulator of skin and surface, Dean Snyder draws us along the edges of a
needle with their precise improvisation,
scatological, yet organic beauty: tumescent orchids hanging on fragile vines, drooping
and this curious alchemy incites a witty
leaves, impotent cigarette butts, almost recognizable organs swallowed up in circuitry
invention of form, creature, shape. And
and webs. Snyder creates a florescent world, lush and toxic, channeling us toward an
always, Snyder works in relation, as high
uncanny ecology. In Erebos (2008), a black tree stump floats above an open cardboard
touches low, as flora morph into fauna or
box as if just released, a patched inner tube hanging off one of its broken limbs, tendrils
genitalia, as gears mutate to instruments
of smoke from a burning cigarette becoming thorny vines. Bandaged with hinges and
and transform into rhythm, as drawing
tubes running into and out of its truncated limbs, this unwieldy hybrid improvises in
becomes sculpture becomes drawing.
shape as much as sound. Darkly humorous, the cut and layered drawing conjures a magi-
While Snyder has moved away from rawhide,
cian's box, now empty and open, alluding to, without revealing, many of the obscured
these works remain central as evidence of
sources from which the work feeds. Erebos might also be read as a cartoonish archive of
his detailed intertwining of material and
Snyder's past works-connecting tattoo drawings, rawhide sculptures, obsessive line
process. Sculpture is deeply tied to accum-
drawings of intestinal variations, exotic flowers, '70s punk rock or jazz, erotic, transgres-
ulation and acknowledgement of the intrinsic
sive, as Philip Guston meets Krazy Kat along the boardwalk strip. Like Robert Gober,
properties of the medium; drawing works
Snyder makes a specialty of "high thoughts in low places."l The box captured in the
as a mode of inscription that never only
drawing calls to mind a very real one that arrived on my doorstep, marked "playground
glances the surface but always cuts deep.
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Sculpture 34 .9
Kuya 's Shade , 2007. Epoxy, carbon fi ber, and
laser-cut stainless steel , 65 x 67 x 89 in .
Sitting in his studio surrounded by inprocess drawings, experiments in resin,
color, and foam, we speak about the mythology of crows- birds that travel together,
that mourn their dead. Such carrion rituals transpose human intention onto animals or perhaps question what this kind
of anthropomorphizing means from our
perspective or from theirs. We also look
at nocturnal photographs of orb weaver
spider webs dripping with dew, taken during a residency in Hawaii. As metaphor
and material, the web signifies a potent
constellation. The distance between crow
and spider, between flight and entrapment, speaks to the intimate relationship
between form and content in Snyder's
work. A web, Arachne's gift made of the
strongest natural fiber, creates a sticky,
tenuous, and swaying surface to trap
aerial aspirations. In Kuya's Shade (2007),
the web articulates the tension between
the arched limb of a carbon fiber and
epoxy tree turned swollen root. In Arachna's Arcade (2008) and Middle Way (2014),
the web is wrought in stainless steel and
hung in a corner of a doorway as a paradoxically fragile drawing in space and intrusion
of the garden into the gallery.
Snyder's capture of image in medium is
almost photographic, casting an inverse
vision of the natural world as if looking
at Rodney Graham's photographs of trees
whose roots spread out against the sky.
There is a seductive beauty to Graham's
photographs, yet he also stages a perceptual gag about how we see: the world
revealed to us before it is flipped in our
mind's eye. While Snyder does not work
in photography, he often cites its early
influence: "Photography haunts me. I
am addicted to processes and image, and
photography is both mechanical and
process-oriented physics and chemistry:'2
(2013). Perhaps we could think of Snyder's
work as an extension of "photography by
other means" to borrow Kaja Silverman's
phrase. Her provocation invites a renewed
Nepenthe, 2008. Epoxy, carbon fiber, and fiberglass,
130 X 40 X 84 in .
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Sculpture November 2015
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Above left: Arachna 's Arcade, 2008. Waterjet-cut and mirror-polished stainless steel, 59 x 76 x .2 in . Right : NeverMind, 2013. Candy and pearl auto enamel ,
carbon fiber, and epoxy, 62 x 49 x 27.5 in. Below: Almost Blue, 2008. Auto enamel, epoxy, carbon fiber, and cast optical resin, 128 x 58 x 8.5 in .
attention to the ways in which photography has been theorized, disputing its allegiance to documentary or representational truth and
instead affirming its subversive work on representation. As she explains
in conversation with George Baker: "A photograph isn't a representation or even an index. It is a special kind of analogy-the kind that our
culture most needs. A photograph and its 'referent' have so many
affinities that we are unable to separate them from each other, but
also enough differences to keep us from conflating them. This coupleand I use the word couple advisedly, because the two parts of a photographic analogy have as much of a right to be called that as Orpheus
and Eurydice-helps us to see that similarity is not sameness and
that difference does not automatically translate into opposition. They
also show us that there really is a world and that not all images are
human constructions:'3
Analogy, according to Silverman, is not about hierarchy and resemblance but a more capacious container, a "corresponding with, rather
than corresponding to." Inside this dynamic encounter, the artist is
cast as receiver, which for Snyder translates to a mode of working
under the influence of the crow and of the spider. Gathering together
his many "objects of desire"- bone dice, the Amorphophallus titanum,
corpse flowers, balloon toys, shells, Buster Keaton skits, microscopic
diatoms and seeds, serpents, a fragmented Venus of Hohle FelsSnyder renders a not quite recognizable world that is as much dia gram of an unknown species as topography.
His recent drawings on frosted Mylar and black museum board act,
he explains, as "an almost inverse operation that felt more object-
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S!ulpture 34 9
like:' Translated into sculptural form, carved in foam,
wrapped with carbon fiber, sanded, and painted in
glowing hues of indigo, green , purple , these images
effect a high-tech fetish finish , a seductive aerodynamic form less abject and more curvaceous. Almost
Blue (2008) appears as a frozen reflecting pool of
urethane auto enamel liquidity with shimmering aborted
fluidity, like the skin of a surfboard or the finish of a
racing cycle held in stillness.
Notes
1
Dave H•:key, In the Dance Hall of the Dead, • .n Robert Gober (Ntw York D•a Center for the
Arts, 1993}. p. 13
2 Unless otherw•se noted, quotat•ons from the art•st are from a conversat•on w•th the author.
2013
3 George Baker and Ka1a S•lverman. 'Pr1mal S•bl.ngs: Artforum, Spflng 2010. pp. 176-183
}enn joy co -founded collective address, a choreo graphic research space in Brooklyn, and teaches in
sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her
book, The Choreographic, was published by MIT Press
in 2014 .
Sculpture November 2015
Above: 8/oodKnot, 2014. Urethane paint over epoxy and carbon fiber composite, 68 .5 x
61.5 x 15 in . Below: Installation view of " Dean Snyder," Cade Tompkins Projects, 2014.
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