Phoebe Washburn: October 24

Wednesday, October 24
6:30pm
The New School
John Tishman Auditorium / 66 West 12th Street


"Things that get rigged up, propped up, balanced or weighted down to keep the whole process running smoothly," says sculptor Phoebe Washburn, "are often ingenious, funny, desperate, stupid or a little of all of those things." Sometimes mistaken as a renewable resources advocate for her enthusiasm for refuse, Washburn makes monumentally scaled, architectonically precocious installations out of vast amounts of materials she scavenges from the neighborhoods around her apartment and studio, as well as other locations in which her sculptures appear. Materials have included cardboard boxes from Staples, Bonita Bananas, FedEx, Frito Lay, Evian and Clorox—as well as scrap wood, sawdust (which the artist refers to as "beaches"), thumbtacks, pencils, scaffolding, bags of cement, pencil boxes, phone books, duct tape, masking tape, zillions of drywall screws and "mis-tints" rejected from Janovic. Starting with a premeditated finished product in mind but allowing the particular characteristics of her materials to inform the final result, Washburn makes work that has also been compared to such varied phenomena as a pixilated landscape, a glacier, a shantytown, a deranged demolition site, a tsunami, a whirlpool, a tornado, a 24th-century Saõ Paulo, a big-rock candy mountain on stilts and even San Francisco as seen if one approaches the city from the south. Forcing her audience to crouch, bend and otherwise adapt to sculptures to partake of various perspectives, Washburn's sculptures evidence the energy and process dedicated not just to manufacturing and discarding mass amounts of resources but repurposing them into elaborate, playful works of art.

$5 General Admission/ $3 for seniors/ FREE to all students with valid ID

http://www.publicartfund.org/pafweb/talks/talks_current.htm