Current Exhibitions

2013 Annual Summer Exhibition curated by Bill Maynes, Director, The Fields Sculpture Park
Opening June 15, 2013
On view through October 31, 2013

The Fields Sculpture Park is pleased to announce the opening of its 2013 season on Saturday, June 15, with an installation of new and recent works by Nathan Carter, Tom Doyle, Paula Hayes, Allan McCollum and Erwin Wurm.

The exhibition will include a large site-specific installation by Paula Hayes, who was called "a loving mother of living form and a sculptor of the first magnitude" by New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz. Ms. Hayes was nominated for a Cooper Hewitt Design Award in Landscape Design in 2009. Her work was shown last year at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Also new to the park is Big Kastenmann (Box Man) by Austrian Neo-Dadaist, Erwin Wurm. Made of cast aluminum, and painted with enamel paint, it measures 16 1/2 feet tall. Wurm's works are in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and many others.

Sculptor Tom Doyle will be represented by five large-scale works, cast in bronze from original wood forms. A regular–though youthful–visitor to New York's Cedar Tavern, the legendary hangout of the Abstract Expressionists, Doyle is fully conversant with the scale and ambition of that movement. In the words of writer and art historian, Dore Ashton, "it was Calder and not David Smith who inspired him among the forebears. His obvious love of transparency gave him the desire to create volumes that were, in effect, etched in the wind."

This year, the gallery is devoted to works by Nathan Carter, a young sculptor living in Brooklyn. Both lyrical and dramatic, his dioramas draw their inspiration from a wide range of existing "ready-made" systems, including decaying technological devices, pirated communication networks, rogue nation-states, rolling blackouts, picaresque novels, and the labyrinthine graphics of mass transit.(1)

Allan McCollum began making the first works in his Perfect Vehicles series in 1985, presenting and re-presenting an iconic sculptural form in order to investigate the ways in which a single object can contain cultural meaning. All of the Perfect Vehicle sculptures bear the same shape–that of a Chinese ginger jar, a traditional vessel that has been extensively copied and reproduced for centuries.(2) The McCollum works are courtesy of the Newark Museum.

1 Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University 
2 Public Art Fund, New York

Paula Hayes, Silicone Planters

Erwin Wurm, Big Kastenmann

Tom Doyle, Seneca

Nathan Carter, WILLIAMSBURG BROOKLYN PUBLIC HOUSING PROJECT CONCEALED CALL AND RESPONSE . . .

Mel Kendricks: jacks

Known for process-oriented works, especially ordering systems and networks of forms that result in totemic sculptures, usually in wood, Kendrick here transposed his experiments to more unorthodox materials. He used hot-wire techniques to carve large chunks of Styrofoam. In "the jacks," the cylindrical cut-out sections removed from the blocks indeed resemble the shapes of pieces used in the children's game of Jacks. Molds were made for each section and filled with alternating black and white layers of concrete. The textural nuances of the hot-wire cuts remain in the final work, assuming the look and texture of wood grain.

In each composition the extracted component rests atop the now-perforated base block. And like the pieces in a game of jacks, the upper section of each work appears to have landed on three points, while three intersecting tubes traverse the interior of the lower section. Light and air could now penetrate the lower portion and envelop the upper segment, allowing for a more complete integration with the surroundings, profoundly effective in an outdoor, nature setting.

From David Ebony, Bolder Games: Mel Kendrick's "jacks." Click here for more information.

Mel Kendrick, jacks, 2011, cast stone, dimensions variable