Edward Raffel - Klondike Sidewinder II


Edward Raffel - Klondike Sidewinder II
PVC fittings, body filler, circline fluorescent tubes with exposed magnetic ballasts, aluminum wire to provide floating ground plane reference, sateen fabric, steel plate and hardware, aluminum tube and plate, steel cable
34"W x 33"D x 33"L
I was trained as a dentist, self-taught as a portrait painter and now am a sculptor. Primarily I am trying to do things that I have not seen before, eschewing levels of art school formalism and creating information-based pieces that reveal the structure and beauty in common objects, often in patterns involving self-symmetry. I admire Hilary's work, as she applies paint in a way I had never seen, seemingly a totally new way to paint.
As of about 30 years ago, I have felt that stylistic combinatorics, three-dimensional painting, and high-concept high-craft work were areas still ripe for explanation. Our information age demands informational art, but alas I am stuck in the analogue domain. I recently saw a very prominent local artist say in their artist talk that if you merely follow all the standard tenets of art-making involving composition, color, line, texture, etc., you will produce good art. This rule-following mindset is the death of the novel, and antithetical to truly creative processes. The more rules you can break the better, as long as the results merit the risk. I am not claiming anything on my own, as I often feel like most of my work fails in some fundamental way, but often because my addiction to minimalism creates fear that disallows the final 2 percent. So, I often go back to older work and revise them when new solutions or ideas appear.
I view art as entertainment designed for an audience with an ever-decreasing attention span. I truly hope you find these objects entertaining, interesting, fun, and beautiful in some way.