Soldered brass, 11 x 18 x 8, 2008.
Once Upon a Time is a story’s opening phrase turned into a still life. The tale-teller’s formula puts everything that follows outside the present, and the sculpture is built from the objects that tradition of painting uses for the same purpose. The vanitas still life, in the seventeenth century, gathered instruments, shells and ruined or broken things on a table to say that all of it has already passed. Here a flared horn stands upright at one end and a bundle of short tubes lies at the other, with a ribbed wing or shell between them and a ragged leaf at the foot. The whole lies stretched out low, like something laid out on a surface after the event.
The ring is the center of the piece. It is a round opening cut through a wedge of plate, with the wall visible through it, so it can be read as a dial or a window. It has no hands and no pane. In a vanitas the timepiece or the skull marks where time runs out, and this one is emptied before the figures arrive.
The horn is the herald. Fairy tales begin with a call to attention, and a trumpet stands at the head of the sculpture and faces up into the air. What it announces is absent. The story belongs to whoever looks through the ring, and the title keeps the time vague enough that it could be any.
