Welded steel, 12 x 12 x 12, 2000.
A portrait is made of a person and a still life of things, and the title gives the portrait’s attention to the still life. The sculpture does it by staging. A flask with a round base and a narrow neck stands at the right of a dark recess, with a post framing it at the left and a pair of sloping plates overhanging it like a mantel. It’s the only upright, rounded form in the group, and it holds the middle of the recess the way a sitter holds the middle of a portrait, set off against the dark interior behind it.
The rest of the group is a still life’s furniture. A plate serves as the table, standing on short, stubby feet. Two rolled plates lie along the top of the enclosure with a hooked wire rising from them, and the whole fits in a twelve-inch cube, the volume of a shadow box.
The flask has no features to go on. Its likeness is carried by its stance and by the enclosure that singles it out, and the portrait is made of position: a bottle given the place a person is given.
