easy to assemble
John Marriott
May 10 – September 15, 2006
John Marriott, easy to assemble, 2006; Paint and asphalt shingles on wood over a steel structure approximately 15' high x 15' across
Artist Statement
With its airborne walls and rooftop, easy to assemble has the unexpected look of a structure disassembling in midair or a shed designed by a cubist carpenter. What we see is a shed ‘deconstructed’ with its components suspended in space. The parts hang in the air as they would in a photograph extracted from the flow of events, their circumstances sealed in the static relationships of a pictorial composition. The difference here is that, despite these visual cues, we are confronted with objects in space that we can walk around, viewing their stasis from various angles.
At the heart of easy to assemble are perceptual and philosophical tensions that arise when we probe the relationships between “what is shown” and “what is perceived.” This sculpture inhabits space reflexively as an arrangement of visual cues. Its physical presence is intended to be iconic, its planes and sight-lines refer back to principles of geometric perspective that are used to depict illusions of three-dimensional space in two-dimensional images. The visual cues here are formal yet contradictory – movement versus stillness; three-dimensional space and form versus two-dimensional illusionism – strangely formal but defying function. The resulting experience plays with the perceptual signposts that we have learned to subconsciously scan for when interpreting two-dimensional imagery and three-dimensional experiences. By disrupting our sense of this structure’s utility, its formal elements take on a strange new life.
easy to assemble straddles the interstices between what we choose to represent and how we relate to the representations we make. The title, easy to assemble, plays off of interrelated tensions – it suggests the act of construction while its architecture is literally deconstructed to divide and shape space. Its title prompts us to imagine that perhaps this un-structure is the manifestation of something both chaotic and deliberate. It nods in solidarity to those who have struggled to follow the confusing instructions and diagrams that accompany build-it-yourself pre-fabricated sheds. This envisioning of assemblage harkens to chance, daring us to imagine that this sculpture might be the result of someone who misread the shed’s assembly instructions – or chose to ignore them and to create the unexpected from something seemingly pre-determined.
