BEYOND THE POINT GALLERY

Dimensions: 25 feet x 30 feet

Description:

Peter Eller

Rusty Light

2009

 

“It’s not only one work,” explains Peter Eller.  Rusty Light alters the industrial source materials associated with the building’s history as a can manufacturing company to create a vibrant sculpture marked by new contexts and meanings.  Eller recycles and transforms materials pillaged from a scrap yard in Redwood City and from grocery store shelves to generate a series of complicated relationships between old and new, warm and cold, strong and fragile. 

Eller’s use of the materials is essential to the sculpture’s quiet yet powerful beauty and its depth of meaning.  While the work evokes the ghost of a factory-made utilitarian object, it is handmade and highly conceptual.  Making new materials look old, Eller adds layers of patina to the shiny screens and aluminum cans to produce a rusty aged effect, thus blurring the lines between past and present tenses.  He further animates the metal by reshaping the once flat screens into convex and concave semi-cylinders, creating a dynamic interplay between positive and negative space.  Although, the curved metal mimics the contour of the tubular bulbs, the texture and fragile nature of the glass lights contrasts with the unbreakable metal.  But the metal is without heaviness – the light shines through the holes to create an artwork that is strong but fragile like the glass.  The sculpture is about light—as both the source and the object. 

 

                                                            --Margan Mulvihill