Existing comment:
styx/vodun
2016
poplar, flowers, and various polychrome
Collection of the artist
Representing a funerary vessel, this work references the contrasting traditions of spirituality and death within Western European and West African cultures. It emerged from conversations Farnsworth had with a Ghanaian fantasy coffin-carver, whom he met at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during an artist residency. Echoing the maple seedpod outline of The King Is Dead (on view nearby), the same wood charring technique was used, which Farnsworth does to "edit away information." It creates abstraction and ambiguity, resulting in what he describes as "charcoal drawings in space." |