Rob Kirsch is a former Resident Artist (2002-2007)of The Clay Studio and this solo exhibition is the culmination of his five-year stay within our program. A figurative sculptor, Kirsch’s work combines his love of reading, writing, story telling and text with his interest in the human form.
Reification. Is the fallacy of treating an abstraction as if it were a real thing, with living existence and abilities? In critical theory, it involves concretizing human relations into objects, attributing a naturalness and inevitability to these objects while masking the contingent social relations that give them their meaning.
A Venn Diagram. I think about art in terms of a Venn diagram, two circles with a little gray area where they intersect. The one circle is the artist and all they bring to the work – their intentions, their desires & fascinations, their psychology & history, and their studio practice. The other circle is the audience and all they bring to the work -- as individuals, as members of particular art worlds, and as part of the broader culture. The gray area where these two overlap is the art itself, and what it ends up meaning.
Though I made art when I was young, I really came to being an artist as an adult, after studying and working in other fields – philosophy and anthropology, journalism and media, and the law. Throughout I always looked at art, and I became aware of how much I brought to the work, how I projected meanings and how they congealed around my favorite work, and how that work helped me to see my own meanings in a new light. I hope I’ve made some work that will allow others to do the same.
Language, thought, object. Also, coming back to art from these places, I came back steeped in language, and became fascinated with the relationship between discursive thought, visual image, and the object. “Objectification” is usually taken as a bad thing, but in a contemporary society where more and more of our daily lives involve the dematerialized world electronic information / communication /entertainment, maybe objects can take on a new, almost redemptive quality, a point of pause in the accelerating flow of modern life.
Body & mask. This Venn intersection is also about where the public meets the private, and at that intersection is often the body. Society has always used the body as a template for the metaphors that articulate its values, its anxieties, and its prohibitions -- either literally, in public art and media imagery; or figuratively, in language and rhetoric. This metaphoric richness intrigues me because it makes the body paradoxical: our most personal and private thing, but at the same time, a text endlessly readable by all those around us.
