Myles Starr - Wilde

Vienna

Friday, May 15, 2020

The past day has been filled with phone calls to friends looking for someone to write a text for my exhibition, Wilde.

My search for a scribe ended up mirroring my practice – in both I am looking for something that I can say is objectively good. This is decadent, absurd, and very important to me. 

A sculpture must generate interest, first and foremost, visually. Therefore, a good exhibition text for a sculpture show is to be read after seeing the work.

The work in this show came together in a “Y” like this: 

I have been working with the axiom that much contemporary sculpture has fallen into a lazy and boring trope: too often objects are meant to look like or reference body parts. As a result, I began to think of non-corporeal sculpture; the cairn, the chandelier, the fountain, the candelabra. I also thought about the other things I dogmatically hate in sculpture; moving parts, lights, electronics. I set out to make good sculptures using the elements I so intensely loathed while avoiding the aforementioned body trope.

For a long while I made sculptures with an archive of materials I deemed as having aesthetic potential. As my archive ran dry, I started throwing possessions out. The rationale being: the less I have, the more easily I can identify sculptural potential in the material I keep. When I was down to linens and clothes, I realized that my drying rack had the potential I was looking for. I treated the steel rack as a ceramicist might treat clay. I squeezed, molded, changed, colored, and pondered it. I ended up with three good sculptures.