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Robert Stackhouse
builds his sculptures using common materials: sturdy wooden
beams and delicate slats he cuts, nails, and bolts into
curving wails, sinuous A-frames and boat-like artifacts.
These familiar materials and images turn richly ambiguous
as he explores affinities between architecture and biological
anatomy. In Stackhouse's sculptures, and the paintings and
works on paper they motivate, slats scattered across the
shell of a hull-like sculpture might resemble bones; a boat
keel assumes the appearance of an exotic plant, as patterns
and colors shift and merge. Viewers are thus encouraged
to identify with these lone figures in their looming densities
of color and texture, to be mindful of our mutual passage
through time, our being in space. Stackhouse's sculptures
and paintings invite us into a "place," simultaneously
composed of tenderness and darkness. His works urge us from
comforting familiarity into a stimulated awareness of the
discrete nature of our lives. Pressed by shadow and battered
by winds of time and change, yet they linger, these forms
are testaments to their own individual strengths and the
constancy of human endurance.
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Robert Stackhouse
Blue K. C. Way, 1999
Etching on Paper; 58-1/2 x 41-1/2"
Edition of 20
Published by Tandem Press
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This
exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of Stackhouse's
life and work from 1969 to the present. It traces the importance
of the artist's distinctive early life and his experiences
in Manhattan and in Yonkers; at Peach Lake, N.Y.; at Lundy's
fish camp near Auburndale, Fla.; and at the University of
South (Florida. All are considered as influences upon the
development of his iconic images including the serpent,
the ship and the open-form, lath-sided architectural structures
that have marked his oeuvre. A significant number of the
works draw from the substantial scholarly knowledge of nautical
vessels incorporated in painting and sculpture. This collection
allows study of the artist's significant ties to the culture
of South, specifically to the culture of central Florida
and the Gulf Coast region.
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