Painted welded steel, 134 x 94 x 78, 2006. Ganesha is the god invoked before anything else begins, whether a journey, a marriage or a book, and “Destroyer of Obstacles” is one of his names. The obstacles here are boxes. They are pale yellow, plain and unmarked, stacked at angles, with the upper ones leaning out … Continue reading Destroyer of Obstacles
Painted welded steel, 84 x 36 x 36, 2006. In the story that explains his elephant head, Ganesha begins as a gatekeeper. Parvati sets him at her door while she bathes, with orders to admit no one. Shiva, her husband, arrives and is refused, and in the Shiva Purana he strikes the boy’s head off … Continue reading Guardian of the Golden Gate
Painted welded steel, 68 x 48 x 48, 2006. The title takes the mantra Om Shri Ganeshaya Namah, a salutation to Ganesha, and shortens his name to ganja. The leaves in the sculpture carry the second half of the pun. They are green, long and serrated along the edges, and they curve out from a … Continue reading Om Sri Ganja
Painted steel, cast iron, brass, 66 x 23 x 21, 2006. Ganesha the Oracle sets a fully-attributed, iconographically literate Ganesha atop a municipal bollard cast for the City of Edmonton. The god carries his four canonical implements: the trident inherited from his father Shiva, the tusk broken and repurposed as a stylus for transcribing the Mahabharata, … Continue reading Ganesha the Oracle
Crushed cans, 12 x 12, 2006. The aerosol cans that these pieces are constructed from can be imagined narratively as the peripheral artifacts of creation, bearing more than a passing resemblance to a traditional painter’s flattened, empty metallic tubes of oil paint. Viewing the sculptures literally, this conception expands to represent the peripheral artifacts of … Continue reading Pile On (ff!)
