Culver, Los Angeles
Jesse Robinson
Melt
Ms BarbersProduct >> Sculpture >> Residue When a popsicle drips, the necessary response is to lick it. As these popsicles arrive at room temperature, they convert 100% into liquid and drip down the gallery walls and pool on the floor. It's excruciating. The natural response, the impulse to lick the drips, lick them back up walls, is overwhelming. These popsicles begin as fully realized, off-the-shelf products: cold, stiff, vibrant, their trademarked shapes and colors recognizable as Batman or Tweety. Then, at the very first drip, they become sculptures, as their implied use transforms into two things: an afterimage and a mess. What is this? A series of wall pieces and internally sculpted coolers orchestrated to demonstrate a real-time and aesthetic degradation of an object of desire. Oh! The temporal elements of the sculptures last about an hour (depending on room temperature and how many hot breaths viewers subject them to) before needing to be replenished. The polystyrene plinth coolers will similarly break down, but that will take something like a million years. Still, it’s a matter of perspective. As in much of Robinson’s work, these displays hold the bulk of the tension and workmanship. Made in the service of artificially elevating the status of a found object, the process of their formation bounces between handmade and manufactured (each piece sculpted first by hand, vacuum-formed to make a plastic shell of the same shape, which is cast into to create the final homogeneous form). It successfully draws both modes of process into its essence, carrying the artist’s hand and the precision of mass production, all while seeming to avoid appearing like either one. The resulting “sort of,” which is a strong recurring theme in Robinson’s work, continues in the references of the displays: honest but indefinite representations of sculptural forms borrowed from Brancusi, Rodin, and Linda Benglis, among others. These iconic shapes are further altered with each use, graffitied by the hyper-saturated popsicle dyes they absorb. Amidst the absolute wrongness of the event, blanketed in hot breath, a mess takes shape as Batman loses his.