Following his Hammer Project from late 2008/early 2009, Aaron Curry’s “Two Sheets Thick” pushes his sculpture and 2-D work into an even more immersive mode of surrealism. The contrast from the dull tones of the walls – covered in black-and-white silkscreens – to the bright colors of the towering freestanding sculptures creates a boldly charged environment, one made intriguingly slippery by the transition from the walls to the floor. The walls are papered with repeating patches of water rivulets, which are extended into a couple of the sculptures, which in turn stand somewhat mock-triumphantly on powder-coated aluminum bases with pushcart wheels (painted the same colors as the stands).
There seems to be a lot of self-referential quoting going on, though mainly on a formal level: The reflective rivulets become faux metal in the aforementioned sculptures, and crop up again in smaller mixed media, black-and-white collages. Other small works are either brightly-colored abstractions that, based on one smaller collage, appear to be culled from “Monsters, Inc.” stills, or are limited to black and white patterns; this all heightens the sweepingly graceful back-and-forth between the saturated and the dull. The two bright, neon-colored sculptures, which have a Guernica-in-3D feel, are custom-fit to the installation, and would struggle to not come off as overly-derivative modernist relics on their own. But that’s completely fine. Curry thrives as an installation artist as much as a sculptor – each piece is meant to live in concert.
Published courtesy of ArtSceneCal ©2010
