Keith Walsh, Artist's Statement, Sculptures 2006-2008

The "Cab" floor works emerged in my practice while I was researching Classical and Visionary architecture and post-18th century furniture design.  These met my long-standing interests in automobile design, modernist sculpture, and cold-war era and sci-fi spacecraft.  Each of these sources incorporate primary forms and precise planning and execution whose tectonics and taxis are derived in part from the aesthetics and social legacies of Greek and Roman Classicism. For various reasons, many of these objects have been presented as white or chromatically neutral forms. Through time Classicism lost its polychromatic finishes due to environmental factors, while 20th-century objects have tended to utilize the white monochrome as a means to highlight its volumetric forms or to separate themselves from the appearance or effects of their surrounding environments.

The working theme of the "Cab" is used to simultaneously suggest the contained space of a cabinet and the passenger compartment of any human-scaled vehicle that surrounds an engine.  Akin to the monolith in the film 2001, I am interested in how a viewer's perception of primary forms can elicit both the apparently archaic form and the seemingly futuristic one.  Akin to Classicism itself the sculptures are unique constructed forms that are part of an evolving history or grammar. The Cabs are painted in a pearl-white gloss finish to evoke associations about purity and ethereality. While the sculptures are planned out and methodically executed they are provisional utopian objects or prototypes, and thus may not necessarily be repeated in a production-run or an edition. I think of them specifically as meta-functional thinking-machines situated within the metaphorical and political possibilities of the art gallery.

As variations upon the archaic post-and-lintel structure and the container form, the Cabs function as symbolic time capsules and are thus representative of our attitudes toward forms.  I am interested in the evolution and applications of Classicism because throughout history it has had a mixed association with the ideals of honor, civic virtue and democracy, political power, luxury, ostentation, autocracy.  Classicism’s dignified or somber aesthetics incorporate into its philosophical mandate the concept of the temenos--a perfect world onto itself--that is automatically juxtaposed to the poetic tragedy of human short-comings and mortality—a kind of Classical entropy.  This temenos, as interpreted by Thomas Jefferson, for who it became a model for American democracy, brings Classicism’s mixed association to the forefront of our 21st-Century epoch.  Classicism, while it may appear to be aesthetically irrelevant to our times, can serve as a basis for addressing the gravity of our protracted engagement in war, and of governmental operations in the name of homeland security.