Wade Guyton
- Artist Statement
- Curator Statement
- Website
Artist Statement
Untitled, The Room Moved the Way Blocked looks like a big Minimalist block of wood. It is a parquet covered floor that is raised and folded under itself to create a box-like shape. Five feet off the ground, it becomes a stage. Bigger than a comfortably sized Minimalist shape, it is partially architectural, and affects your experience of the installed doorways. When it was first built in 1998, it was installed in one of a series of galleries at Hunter College. The rooms produced a flow of traffic of people looking at art, and the room assigned to me, functioned simultaneously as a room and a corridor. I pushed the sculpture towards one of the corners, and it blocked one of the doorways five feet up, so you could look into the room and see the rest of the work (a mirrored column, another freestanding striped sculpture and few photographs) over a large expanse of parquet—about 240 square feet of it. Some people climbed over it and into the room, which I liked doing myself. Others walked around. There were multiple views—from outside the gallery, from up on top (looking down on to the other work, or people), or from the floor inside the gallery, from a comfortable distance, as an object. It didn’t fit properly in the room, there was this sense of it being misplaced, a bit too big, but not big enough to be considered massive, or completely fill the room. At the same time, this uneasy relationship that developed between the object and the room became critical to the content of the piece.
Curator Statement
Wade Guyton’s installation, a large three dimensional parquet cube built to mimic the Colorado Building, is a site specific installation that harkens the supreme Minimalist gesture in a suburban prefab Home Depot manifestation. Circumnavigating the piece is not possible, but doing so would reveal no new discovery, just another entrance and another façade. Walking in front of it, or behind it, is just as much of a folly as relating its size to the self, and of course, opens a humoristic, if not metaphoric path to the fatalism of Modernism and Modern living. Indeed—THE ROOM MOVED, THE WAY BLOCKED.