| Murray Favro |
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Favro's current body of work extends the work which occupied him during the late 1970s and early 1980s -- work in which the artist reconstructed by hand, the machines and instruments belonging to industrial production. This painstaking process becomes a way towards understanding -- because of the attention it demands from the artist in order to reproduce the industrial model and execute the artwork. The process results in a ‘life size’ SD40 Diesel Engine constructed in perspective. The function of these machines has been transferred towards being vehicles for knowledge and the imagination. "Children," says Favro, "have no problem understanding what I do. Nor do people who work in factories, or anybody who makes anything -- they all understand it readily." It is the joy and discovery of making which has become the function of these works. He is a unique artist whose sense of wonder and discovery has produced a legacy of important works. His artistic voice, throughout the last three decades, embodies the qualities of originality, exploration, continuity and consistent advancement that are so admired in contemporary art. Railway Tracks, 1995/96 continues Favro's tradition of great art. This seminal work extends Favro's unique sculptural language. Favro's celebrated "projected reconstructions" create a dialogue between the object (3-D construction) and the image (the light projected slide). This layering of object/image plays on the dualistic faculties between object and audience. The image projected from the slide projector supplants the gaze of the viewer. The projecting of meaning from a spectator on the object is analogous with the image cast from the mechanical lens and light of the slide projector. Railway Tracks has consolidated the duality of reality and illusion by drawing on the illusory technique of rendering 3-D space on a 2-D pictorial surface through the meeting of parallel lines, ie. one point perspective. Railway Tracks is a three-dimensional forced perspective sculpture. The use of the projected element has been rendered superfluous in this new work. In the early 1990s Favro's Sunlight on Table, 1990 and Snow on Steps, 1994 played upon a similar objective, with the dichotomy of object reality versus the recreation of illusory light, through paint, on a table top, in Sunlight on Table and on a snow-covered front porch, in Snow on Steps. The projected slide and light element was replaced by painting. Railway Tracks, 1995/96 has extended further the dialogue between illusion and reality without the assistance of projection or paint. To date, this is Favro most consolidated "reconstruction".  |
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