| Gay Outlaw |
| In introducing an
exhibition of her work to a group of us visiting Refusalon earlier this year, Gay Outlaw explained that part of  what drives her art making is a desire to
articulate form in an "exquisite language".The word exquisite -with its
connotations of care, precision, and beauty -might have seemed odd in reference to an
installation dominated by a huge sculpture made of black rubber dishwasher drain hose
filled with plaster. What is so intriguing about Outlaw's work - whether in sculpture or
photography - is how she synthesizes her disparate vocabulary of forms, materials volumes,
and surfaces to create a visual language at once coherent, particular, and indeed
exquisite. |
| The idea for Black
Hose Mountain originated with a smaller work made of other cylindrical forms glued
together, not unlike Nest in the present installation."When I made my first
pencil piece where I glued pencils together and carved into them, I consciously asked
myself, How can I take this Idea up in scale -the notion of carving into cylindrical
forms?" Outlaw later made hills of chalk before deciding to tackle a mountain. As she worked on the piece, Outlaw kept thinking of one of Rodin's sculptures of Balzac, the nineteenth-century French novelist."Rodin's Balzac is a draped hulking figure - there's a rawness weight… and a lean," she said. "His portrait has a lot of movement, yet it 's as immovable as a mountain." With equal attention to volume and
surface, and the shifting optical effects as one moves around the piece, Black Hose |
| Change, undulation, movement disrupt
traditional notions
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Mountain, as most of Outlaw's work, is
distinguished by its sense of being alive. Sometimes Outlaw uses materials that have
a limited, if not necessarily predictable life span. The artist's training in French
pastry and cuisine has clearly informed her choice to make sculpture out of puff pastry
and caramel. She embraces the degenerative crumbling, melting, and crystallization that
tend to occur when the pieces are on view; some works situated outdoors have been
eaten. (In the true spirit of holiday legend, however, the fruitcake core of the
thirty-four-foot-long public sculpture, Tinned Wall/Dark Matter, was perfectly preserved
after its two-year stint in San Francisco's Yerba Buena gardens and was just reused for
Dark Matter Redux.) 
of
sculpture as being stable, static. There is something both enigmatic and familiar about
Outlaw's works .Yet ultimately these pieces are of their own time and place, hermetic and
contained. 