“Crush” is an edition of eighty-five compacted, figurative sculptures which continues my exploration of the distilled human form. The images document a 2013 installation in the atrium of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, Florida. The sculptures are twenty inches tall and appear to have gone through an egg slicer, collated and reassembled with missing pieces. The forms are created by tracing MRI slices of a standing human body. Selected human-scaled shapes are transferred to 1/4" Sintra slabs, cut out and glued together. All of the sculptures are identical except for their heads, which face in different directions. The sculptures navigate grey wooden pathways that wrap the interior of the 40x40x40’ atrium space. Several other sculptures are positioned elsewhere in galleries and stairwells. Walls become floors as the forms create their own horizontal and vertical topographies. Viewers observe the installation from multiple vantage points – the lobby, the floor of the atrium, the stairwells, and the gallery balconies. En masse, these figures create their own psychological space, oblivious to the soft, organic audience that wanders amongst them. Through its expansive space and compressed figures, “Crush” create a vertiginous fun-house mirror – subverting our reflections and our perceptions of the physical world.

All photos by Douglas J. Eng unless otherwise noted
Photo by Heather Cox