Vibrant, playful abstractions imbued with a sense of immediacy and urgency comprise this year’s annual faculty exhibition, featuring recent sculptures and other work by Visual Arts Professor Chris Duncan. The show opened Thursday, March 18 and runs through Sunday, May 9 in the Mandeville Gallery.
Both Duncan’s two- and three-dimensional works evoke movement, emotion and memory. And for him, the process of creating these pieces is central to the final form they take. What occurs during the making of each piece causes an evolution in form from the concept to completion. Adding and subtracting material, Duncan works until the perfect moment of tension exists between line and volume, solid and void, gravity and balance.
Mario Naves, an artist who writes about art, has enjoyed Duncan’s work. In a catalogue essay he points to “Grand Canal,” a piece included in the upcoming show, as evidence that Duncan’s “a sculptor of no small gifts.”
“What’s remarkable about ‘Grand Canal’ is less it’s crafting – though that is essential, of course, to the work’s realization – but the fact that it pirouettes,” Naves wrote. “Here is a sculpture that moves.”
“The visual arts are static only to the extent that an artist fails to animate his materials,” he continued. “Duncan brings to fruition this longstanding truth with consummate authority.”
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