Title

Landscape Abstracted

Artist

Moppett, Damian

Date

2021

Medium

aluminum

Type

sculpture

Dimensions

1036.32cm height x 914.4cm width x 45.72cm depth

Owner

Millennium Group

Accession Number

NA

Location

2388 Douglas Rd, Burnaby, BC V5C 5B2

Category

Private Development Public Art

Collection

Public Art

Lat/Long

49.262995,-122.987119

View in Google Maps

http://www.google.com/maps?q=49.262995,-122.987119

The form of the sculpture is meant to reference a maquette made by American Modernist sculptor Alexander Calder. This is an ongoing conversation in my practice as I have made several works in the past that have referenced the work of Calder. The mobile I made for my solo exhibition at the Rennie Collections’ Wing Sang Gallery in 2011, Broken Fall, is the largest thus far and plays on notions of appropriation, art history and destruction. The Calder work that is referenced for this sculpture is a maquette for a sculpture that he never realized. My proposed sculpture will look as though a vaguely ‘Calder-esque’ artwork has been animated or made to look as though it’s fluttering in the wind and made of elastic materials.

Damian Moppett (b. 1969, Calgary, Alberta; lives/works: Vancouver) has long been engaged with the processes and materials of painting and sculpture, and their histories, which he uses for the construction of his own vernacular. In his work, Auguste Rodin and Mike Kelley hold court alongside amateur ceramics and humourous interpretations of classical modernist sculpture. In recent years, the eccentric personal and art historical references found in his earlier works remain significant, but much less overt. Newer sculptures, paintings, and installations take on more abstracted forms that are more difficult to pin to their referents, as they sit just beyond the limits of figuration. For example, in Moppett's recent work, as in his painting Alan Jarvis Burning Milne Paintings at Six Mile Lake, 1939 (2016), a large work on canvas which appears to be created in an abstract-expressionist style, the artist in fact creates new compositions by citing brushstrokes or marks appearing elsewhere, but made unidentifiable through a painstaking and labourious process of translation: tracing free expressionistic gestures on paper, and placing and transferring these using unconventional tools that may not be apparent in the finished work. The process is akin to a sort of record-making, closer to printmaking than painting, and what appears to be immediate in the works is predetermined like a purposeful accident aimed at playing with and commenting on the idea of artistic mastery.