Buttress Series / Steps and Ladders

(1976 - 1978)

The form of the buttresses in Buttress Series is lifted directly from Brancusi’s canonic sculpture, Bird in Space. Like Brancusi’s work, made of wood, granite, marble, bronze and plaster, the first one in this series was carved in wood and subsequently cast in several different materials: bronze, acrylic resin, plaster, and toothpicks. More importantly, Buttress Series explores the sculptural object as inextricably connected to architectural space. Thus, by dispensing with the pedestal and turning the work into a kind of floor-to-wall hypotenuse (“buttress”), the gallery space and the sculpture become inseparable.

In Steps and Ladders, the basic idea of “floor-to-wall” or “traversing space” was transformed from the organic shape of Buttress Series into basic architectural vocabulary. Small-scale steps, ladders and step pyramids became the building blocks of a kind of ancient ritual space in the spirit of Piranesi’s Carceri series or Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The work in this period, with all its variations, was strongly influenced by Rick Oginz, my studio mentor at Otis Art Institute, and Roland Reiss, a visiting lecturer who built small-scale “social tableaux.” It was during these years that sculpture, for me, changed from pure expression into conceptual, contextual, and site-specific processes.