Tim Hawkinson @ Blum & Poe

This exhibition is amazing. Thank you Blum & Poe, thank you.

In their press release they write,

Tim Hawkinson’s practice is known for its sprawling, surrealistic self-portraiture in which the body, through intense introspection, becomes an alien landscape open to radical redefinition and transformation. This artistic agenda is mirrored materially by Hawkinson’s use of familiar and ubiquitous consumer packaging and household objects in highly unconventional ways. The new work continues these refrains, while also exploring more pointedly, temporality, mortality, and the cyclic.

Hawkinson works in a wide array of media involving sculpture, painting, photography, and installation. The exhibition reflects this range, with such pieces as Orrery, a towering eight-foot tall sculpture of a woman at a spinning wheel atop a platform of rotating concentric circle tire treads. This piece looks to mechanical models used to illustrate the motions of the planets and their moons in our solar system. A sculptural collage of water bottles, plastic shopping bags, recouped hardware, and odds and ends comprise the woman’s head, hands, eyes, ears, and spindle; every part of the piece is interconnected and eternally spinning. Even the pattern of her dress creates the illusion of motion with its “Rotating Snakes” pattern designed by Kitaoka Akiyoshi. Wheels upon wheels, this hyperkinetic sculpture resembles a Whirling Dervish, a hypnotic mystical dancer forever circling and cycling between the material world and the cosmic.

Image: Tim Hawkinson, Orrery, 2010.