January 17, 2012

Nest

 

Gay Outlaw, Nest (1999). Featured in Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards, SFMOMA. Photo: author.

Gay Outlaw constructed Nest (1999) out of colored pencils, glued together and then belt sanded into the shape of a wasp nest. It is one of a series of pencil pieces the artist created in the 1990s.

Critics relate Outlaw’s work to minimalism. Fair enough. Outlaw acknowledges the influence. Her sculptures explore materiality, form, and space in minimalist ways. But minimalism isn’t usually this playful. Or this bizarre. Several different domains collide here to create a kind of conceptual and aesthetic shock.

The surrealists had a name for this: Convulsive Beauty. André Breton named one of Convulsive Beauty’s categories of possibility erotique-voilée (veiled-erotic). The gist of this concept is that the everyday object, by becoming something other than itself, releases suppressed desire. Perhaps Meret Oppenheim was thinking along these lines when she created her famous Fur Teacup and Saucer (1936).

Nest has the same kind of compressed power. Without disavowing its debt to minimalist sculpture, Nest gestures further back, to surrealist objects.

 

Tags:

Comments (1)

  • Tucker Nichols says:

    what I like so much about looking at gay outlaw’s work (aside from her astoundingly great name) is that I can picture her trying to figure out what will happen to these materials and forms with each iteration. what’s a hexagon? what if you stretch it or slice it? hey it looks like a wasp nest. most of my favorite art has that kind of inquiry deep down, although it’s usually not so formal. her stuff is weird enough to keep it from being a lifeless formal experiment.

Leave a comment

Please tell us what you think. We really love conversation, and we’re happy to entertain dissenting opinions. Just no name-calling, personal attacks, slurs, threats, spam, and the like, please. Those ones we reserve the right to remove.
Required

Sign Up

Join our newsletter for infrequent updates on new posts and Open Space events.
  • Required, will not be published

Dear Visitor,
We regret to inform you that Open Space is no longer active. It was retired at the end of 2021. We sincerely appreciate your support and engagement over the years.

For your reference, we encourage you to read past entries or search the site.

To stay informed about future ventures or updates, please follow us at
https:://sfmoma.org.

Thank you for being a part of our journey!