RICKELS' ESSAY Crockett Fortune Katz Pearlstein Robinson Shaw Tapola Weaver Welch

STEVE ROBINSON STEVE ROBINSON Brooklyn, NY STATEMENT Disasters, crises and trauma are continually restaged through the media in a calculated yet pathetic attempt to understand and normalize the unknown, the spectacular, the horrific, and the unknowable. The attempt to make sense of these events is an attempt to define the borders of everyday existence. This is a process that we actively participate in, whether as curious onlookers or as fantasy victims. I'm interested in the elusiveness and seductiveness of the literal depictions of extremity. In the same way, a dress rehearsal can never anticipate the wedding but attempts to dictate its reality. The complexity of the sculptures illustrates this elusiveness. These sculptures are images treated as raw data, made of stacked layers of insulation foam with each layer of foam extruding a part of an original image. The layers are stacked to such extremes that only from a restricted point of view will a viewer see the source image. The sculpture places the viewer into precise positions in order to see the precise positioning of the figure in the image. These sculptures provide an experience that is first abstract and then representational. In the difference between the first and second mode of viewing lies a kind of undefined terrain. The subjects in these pieces are residents of that terrain, facilitated, governed and created by their technical surroundings. One relies upon the wheelchair and the laptop computer to navigate the world, throwing each of these vehicles into a collaborative description of access, an emerging norm. Another crouches in a crash position in an airplane seat with headphones on, both pinioned and free within a prolonged, maybe infinite, moment of suspense. I remember a Japanese story about a fully sentient cardboard box that witnessed its own manufacture, usage and then its slow decline: after transporting tangerines to a store it was saved from garbage, used for a family move and finally blew into a pond, where it ecstatically and slowly dissolved, feeling its consciousness grow more and more diffused..... EDUCATION 1995 M.F.A. Yale School of Art 1990 B.F.A. Cornell University GROUP EXHIBITIONS January -ÊMarch 1996 PSY-FI, Real Art Ways, Hartford, Connecticut April 1995 M.F.A. Exhibit, Yale School of Art A&A Gallery, 180 York Street, New Haven, Connecticut November 1994 All-School Exhibit, Yale School of Art October 1994 Slim-Fit Sculpture, 5 Bridge Street, Shelton, Connecticut November 1993-February 1994 Prints x Three, travelling exhibit. Cornell University, Rhode Island School of Design, and California State University at Long Beach. November 1993 First- Year Exhibit, Yale School of Art May 1991 Objects in the Void, Willow Street Gallery, 21 Willow Street NW, Washington, D.C. May 1990 B.F.A. Exhibit, Cornell University Tjaden Gallery, Olive Tjaden Hall, Ithaca, New York