Broadway Gallery is pleased to announce
Andy Wilhelm
A solo exhibition
December 16-31, 2009
Opening Friday 18, 6-8pm, 2009
Andy Wilhelm’s sculptures are made out of wood, bronze, gypsum cement, Styrofoam and glue. The objects are made up of a diverse collection of forms: some fundamental, like spheres, and others vaguely figurative, and yet others resembling tools. All have been rendered in a manner that reveals a time consuming practice. The process of making communicates a need to create a structure to explore the limits of material, and it’s ability to anchor ideas to the present time and place. Within this formal structure there is allusion to objects and potential phenomenon that exist on a much different scale than the one the viewer and the object currently occupies.
Clamp Ball, 2009, is made entirely out of many wooden hand-screw clamps, clamped to themselves in a frenetic jumble. The clamps vary in size, and are organized in a pattern of descending scale. The smallest elements on the fringe are dwarfed by the larges clamps positioned in the center of the arrangement. The entire volume looks like a dense ball of frenzied matter, with subtle variations in color, alluding to some imagined particle or cluster.
The cast bronze sculpture Untitled(Octomom), 2009, seems to sprightly balance on top of its steel stand. Conjoined spheres appear to have arranged themselves along electrically charged polar axes.
Untitled(Pick A Hole and Stick With It), 2009, is a hollowed out shell made of thin cast gypsum cement that hovers in space. It has a ghostly figurative presence, that is at once a curving, sensual form, but also skeletal and drained of life.
Untitled, 2006, is undulating spiral of wood shavings and glue that seem to have grown by accretion around an ordinary ballpoint pen.
