• STEVEN CAREAU
    Icons and Instruments: wall sculptures

    McCoy Gallery • Rogers Center for the Arts
    Merrimack College
    August 29 - October 7, 2016

  • Instruments are tools that enable our intentions by assisting us to perform tasks in specialized ways.

    Steven Careau’s sculptures presented in this exhibition suggest a variety of configurations that imply an ability to adjust to tasks and to the environments in which tasks are performed. For example, the rod in sculpture W14 extends out from a perforated wood square and bends to stretch up the wall where it bends again to turn and pierce the wall. The wood square is also joined to a thick steel bar affixed to the wall. The rod and the bar are not parallel to one another, whereas the bar and the square are. The variable positions and angles as indicated by the perforations convey both the posture (or gesture) and the alterable size of the object and its orientation on the wall. W14 measures and locates itself.

    Regarding location, consider the wall itself: Wall works, like paintings and drawings and some sculptures, typically require fixtures (hardware) to be exhibited on walls. Typically, such fixtures are hidden as necessary but not expressive features of the art they support. In the case of Careau’s sculptures, the fixtures are significant parts of the objects. They enter and grasp the wall and in so doing they occupy and claim territory. One might say they colonize the walls of the gallery. These colonizing actions suggest a surprising vitality for sculptures that are so pristinely mechanical and cool in how they are executed. A number of them have elements of wood in which grain patterns recall their organic origins and their previous vitality. Here they are shaped to be incorporated into constructed configurations that might be considered instruments of cognition, or tools that provoke the discovery of ideas.

    Regarding cognition Careau’s copper-lined perforations as indicaters that a variety of possible gestures are in play, allow for and encourage a change of mind for other schemes of working in space.

    Abstraction is at the heart of this work. Careau’s sculptures do not actually represent instruments, yet they do suggest the behaviors described above. If they do not indeed represent measuring or locating, we can understand them as presenting such functions as idea images or icons of measured, otherwise unknown, subjects enabled by these instruments.

    This sense of enabling is not meant to diminish the viability of that which is measured. Reconsider the walls. Like most art galleries, the space provides a fairly plain neutrality. Look at C4, pictured on the right. The object is itself measurable and its elements are similar to W14, but it is arranged differently and suggests another purpose. Is it con ned to its elements? Does C4 also include a certain acreage of the wall beyond which it is placed? Does that space extend to neighboring spaces inhabited by other sculptures? Where does that space end? Does the thickness of the object extend, albeit lightly, into our space to include ourselves? One of the key moments in modern sculpture occurred when the English sculptor Anthony Caro eliminated the base from his constructed steel sculptures and in so doing, inserted sculpture into our space, freeing it from the stigma of being revered. Steven Careau’s work is a meditation on our common space that offers access to that which is unseen within. His sculptures operate within the world as much as they operate within the category of art.

    As these sculptures grip and secure positions on the walls, they assert their presence and an imagined visibility of what they measure.

    David Raymond
    McCoy Gallery Director