steel with oxidation
6’ x 9’6” x 36” (footprint 36”x36”)
2007
it pretty much is just rusting steel on a hill, through time and season.
For me, Strawberry Roan does conceptually pull from its namesake, in that song, as the pony that I can’t ride. As “process” or “performance”, being like such a ride, in physical dialogue with making and material, but never broken or tamed to pacification. It also has to do with a bit of the fetish I have with the strawberry tactile surface of rusting steel in a state of entropy.
As it stands there on your hill, Strawberry Roan is sculpture and place, the two working together. This piece has to do with the locational facing of and awareness to “place”. I best sum all of “what it is”, as a physical, visceral, haptic, moment of silence. A meditative moment of silence that is found between a specific place, you standing there, and the piece of steel that I have put there; and then silence found in your own consciousness as viewer and stander on place. It all actually is activated in your own act of walking. Walking is very important to me in this body of work; walking like hiking, packing, nomadic travel, where place and time is understood in a way far different form the travel of a car or plane. I’m interested in work that becomes a presence in relation to nature like a walking person would, or maybe a horse.
