John Pashilk
   
Pot Series 2003 - 2013Scroll over the small sculpture icon to see a larger version
Power Plant Flora Elise Mini Power Plant Rosie Satellite Sunflower Homage Cactus
Power Plant Flora Elise Mini Power Plant Distilled Spirits Satellite Sunflower Tribute Cactus

Cultivating his skills of realistic figuration through surrealist distortion, scale-shifts, and Pop aesthetic, Pashilk explores earlier questions of connectivity and the mercurial relations between technology and nature. Pashilk articulates that living in the country he was surrounded by nature, which inspired this series. Noticing damaged plant life as he wandered about the countryside, he decided to create his own larger-than-life pots which would contain and protect his whimsical, curvaceous wire-like forms, flowers and plugs.

In his Pot Series, Pashilk's meditates on questions that arose during the 1980s in Silicon Valley and his more recent experience in the country. This series marks the transition from smaller autonomous objects and wall pieces to monumental, public works. Always exhibited in public spaces, outdoors or in large commercial buildings, Pashilk constructs a diametrical temporal trajectory from that of the technology industry. As technology becomes dematerialized, mobile, pervasive and invisibilized. Pashilk's work moves towards the excessively material, publically visible and present.

There is an unmistakable ecological impetus in Pashilk's Pot Series. Fascinatingly, if the euphoria of the 1990s was well-matched in Pashilk's playful aluminumizing, the more foreboding twenty-first century demands allegory, albeit witty, and even fun, according to Pashilk. Taking the series as a whole, it is impossible to evade the pleasures of aesthetic reflection; those inevitable pots simply compel their spectators to mediate on the infinitely mercurial relations between nature and culture. If Pashilk provides the pots, nature herself does the talking, wittily mocking the hubris of techne: nature is the power source, the source of surrealist distortion, of harmonic convergence, of the simple truth sought in so many millennia of civilized dogma.

  www.johnpashilk.com
New Work | Pot Series | Paint Brush Series | Abstract Wall | Tech Bronze | Early Bronze