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Joshua Welker catalog essay by Allison Myers: Joshua Welker's recent sculpture presents few obvious formal intersections. Rather than relying on a particular aesthetic or mode of production, Welker works out of a vivid process of association & investigative thought. Whether in response to a material, a concept, or even a particular shape, his sculptures take on a life of their own while still existing within a larger framework. Seen together, they form a kind of puzzle without a pre-inscribed answer or solution, prompting the viewer to explore the dialogues built around their potentially limitless sphere of signification. Welker's current interest in sculpture's foundational forms, for instance, has led him to create two works that play with the idea of the pedestal. His Untitled in plaster (2008) is a messy stack of cast plaster pedestals & crumbled drywall. Because it is cast on site, the residue & debris of the process give it the appearance of an architectural salvage. By recalling toppled pilasters & shattered walls of sheetrock, Welker questions the sureness of the classical support. Drywall, a dirty tan-ish brown, also serves as the perfect foil to the pristine white of the gallery pedestal. In his Untitled in Plexiglas (2008), Welker reiterates this disruption of the stable, foundational form in a markedly different way. He refers to it as an "exploded pedestal." Where Untitled in plaster approaches the pedestal in a primarily material sense, this work deals with the geometric structure of three-dimensionality. By fragmenting the self-enclosing faces of the cubic form, Welker questions the solidity of the pedestal while also setting up its basic, rectangular shape as something to be looked at in itself. This is further problematized by his use of shiny, black Plexiglas, which attracts the viewer's attention, upsetting the normal passivity of the pedestal as support. Both works question this icon of stability & groundedness in distinctly individual ways. When placed together their disruption of the pedestal's traditional paradigm becomes further amplified as it morphs between the disarray of Welker's Untitled work in plaster & the nearly monumental refraction of the Untitled work in Plexiglas. An excellent example of the way he works in terms of associative observations lies in the wedge shaped connections between the Plexiglas faces, which are derived from the small wedge shims Welker uses to cast the plaster for his Untitled in plaster. This subtle correlation evokes the larger process of observation & association Welker establishes in the space between his works. Meaning & signification is never a grounded affair, but rather floats between his sculptures -- encouraging the viewer to relate qualities such as materiality & three-dimensionality without any fixed target. By working out of a series of non-linear associations, Welker stimulates a rhizomatic network of signification, allowing complex dialogues to play in & between the surfaces of both untitled works. We, the viewers, thus become players in the works themselves, combining our associative understanding of such concepts as the pedestal with Welker's own associative structures of signification. |
