Eric Fertman continues to produce witty and edgy sculpture with big attitude. His wry approach is a means of tackling topical issues through disjuncture. In doing so Fertman suggests the remove we often experience as bystanders to global cataclysms. Modern reality is constructed largely through images and in-turn our confrontation with social and biological strife is constantly mediated. Akin to Rousseau’s encounter with the jungle, it is this artistic license that accounts for Fertman’s immolated and eviscerated forms that merge the vegetal and the zoological into disquieting abstract compositions.
Working with wood is inevitably a reductive process, Fertman makes this all the more so by continuing to employ a proscriptive vocabulary of shapes which range from the humble to the holy: hot dogs, house plants and ziggurats inclusive. These top-heavy, tilted and bent structures evoke a scene of damnation or an arcadia gone rogue. As though he is constructing the set for a sci-fi version of Lord of the Flies based in LA, the McDonalds’ arch is positioned in stark contrast to modernist architectural elements, a toasted palm frond abuts a knobby joint, jagged edges adjoin smooth bulbous and fleshy forms. Although precariously balanced formally and conceptually, these damaged bodies are ultimately static and pacific; it is the calm after the storm.
The Gallery will publish a catalogue with text by Cora Fisher, Curator of Contemporary Art, SECCA, on the occasion of the exhibition.
ERIC FERTMAN was born in 1974 in Boston, MA. He received a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art and Science and has exhibited nationally, most recently with solo shows at Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, NC; The Kemper Museum in Kansas City, MO and in a two-person presentation at Time Equities, Inc., NYC for The Art-in-Buildings Program. Reviews of his work have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times and Sculpture Magazine among others.
