Los Angeles Times, 14 December 2007 Flow of wood evokes motion by Leah Ollman British sculptor Richard Deacon's latest feat rises, dips, twists and turns like a roller coaster 28 feet down the length of L.A. Louver's main gallery. It is an extraordinary material specimen and a wonderland of allusion. There is nothing inert about the piece, called "Dead Leg" and made in association with Matthew Perry. The oak that serves as the bare bones of the work has been revivified (through a strenuous process involving steam and pressure) into fluid, gestural motion. Multi-stranded wooden lines loop with lyrical abandon, stemming from and coming back to rest in a single form that could be read as the titular dead leg, a stiff, prosthetic thing or a crutch. A hollow bat where it rests on the floor, the cylinder morphs into a square as it rises and splits into two strands that careen from their source, harnessed at intervals by coolly elegant brackets of stainless steel. Deacon creates poetry in the space where the organic and mechanical
meet, where the spontaneity of the body partners with the restrained
rigor of the industrial. The piece is supplemented by a separate gallery
full of small, vibrantly colored plaster sculptures that look like little
more than sophisticated chunks of chalk. "Dead Leg" is the
main event, a brilliantly engineered balletic ode to wildness and captivity,
a mellifluous, unlikely tangle of ribboned wood, pure linear thrust coming
to rest with the full stop of an exclamation point. |