The ReInventors thru January 29, 2012

Maiden Rock, WI - Swan Song Contemporary Arts presents The ReInventors featuring new sculptural works by Jan Elftmann, Dean Lucker, Jim Proctor and David Wyrick. The exhibition will be on view at Swan Song Gallery (W3557 Main Street Maiden Rock, Wisconsin) Saturdays and Sundays from 10:30-5:00 through January 29 and by appointment. For more information, contact Swan Song gallery director Cynde Randall at 612-250-9222 or cynderandall@centurytel.net.

The ReInventors presents a fantastic array of material based sculptures by four exceptional artists who locate their artistic inquiry in real space and time. Jan Elftmann, Dean Lucker, Jim Proctor and David Wyrick are known for distinctly different bodies of work but share a profound commitment to transformative practice, re-inventing, re-purposing and/or hybridizing the objects and ideas of their occupation. Their new exhibition at Swan Song Contemporary Arts offers up art that is whimsical, mysterious, obsessive, transcendent and foreboding.



Jan Elftmann is known for her inspirational leadership in America’s Art Car movement and her extraordinary embellishment of automobiles, such the truck that she covered with 10,000 corks. She has been an obsessive collector for decades, amassing vast stores of tiny, sparkly objects that she re-cycles into fantastic works of assemblage. For the ReInventors, Elftmann presents two groups of sculpture: in her uniquely designed “tube art paintings” she captures a dizzying array of multiple objects, presenting a playful and painterly meditation on color and pattern. In her most recent free-standing works, Elftmann encrusts cement animal lawn ornaments with literally hundreds of objects, massing each surface with pop culture debris of similar palette. In “White Hose”, “Yellow Dog” “Purple Rooster” Elftmann calls attention to what is already here, expressing an eco-imperative with flourish. As a contemporary alchemist, Elftmann turns the mundane into the precious, giving us a significant chance to remember and to reconsider what was earlier made and caste away.



As a self-proclaimed object builder Dean Lucker has been most influenced by 15th and 16th century Northern European wood carving traditions. For years he has been recognized for carved and automated sculptures featuring the poetic interaction of a Lucker-like man with other natural beings like trees, flowers and the moon. The dynamic exchange that occurred in these sculptures often yielded a fortune or message about memory or loss. In his new series of “log men” (men who are logs/logs who are men) Lucker collapses the exchange by carving fully integrated trans-species beings that remain completely still. Strangely timeless and in a clear state of decline, Lucker’s log people seem perplexed about their new purpose in a world without hierarchy. Despite their confusion Lucker’s log people appear to have evolved beyond what is human. “We are as common as those things around us” says Lucker. Perhaps the spiritual oneness of the log people is one key to remembering our planetary identity on Earth.



Artist Jim Proctor acknowledges nature as his primary source and guide, crediting the world of plants for everything that he knows about making sculpture. “I am conscious that I am a symmetrical being and I feel a real affinity for the materials that I work with”, says Proctor. He is known for his work to remove invasive species and for diminutive sculptures made entirely from acorns, winged seeds, burrs, stems and fibers—all materials collected, deconstructed and recombined by the artist. Proctor’s new hybrids are surprising real, challenging our understanding and knowledge about native and non-native species. Installed in exquisite shadow boxes of Proctor’s design, his sculptures recall the zeal for collecting scientific specimens in centuries gone by. But Proctor’s intention is not to horde freakish specimens but rather to witness and honor aesthetic intelligence of nature’s design. “It is important that we can see the world around us and increasingly urgent that humans can identify and appreciate the other species on our planet” says the artist.



As a material based sculptor, David Wyrick navigates a wide range of territories from geology, modernist formalism, post-modern critique and the time honored crafts such as cabinet making and stone carving. Compressing knowledge and skill from all of these fields, Wyrick typically selects some aspect of function as a launching point for each work that he creates. In his latest series “hole diggers” Wyrick appropriates and de-purposes rusty garden shovels by whittling and re-turning their handles. Through his structural and decorative intervention, Wyrick releases the shovel from its labor, simultaneously re-commissioning it as a totemic or iconic power object. In this, Wyrick moves beyond any simple statement of irony, holding a new space for the humble work done by shovels of all time. In a mysterious stand-alone untitled work Wyrick presents a granite boulder impaled with an ornately turned cane of wood. Wyrick refers lightly to Steve Martin but one can not help but to recall the sword in the stone. Like Arthur, Wyrick seems to make the impossible come true.