The Elizabeth Harris Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of sculpture titled pools by Steve Currie. This will be his sixth solo exhibition with the gallery.

In a statement about this current body of work Currie writes:

“This group of small sculptures expands on the dense hydrostone components that were the counterpoint to the ephemeral wire matrixes in the "Gone Fishing" show of three years ago. I have chosen to pursue an interest in dense, architectonic sculpture as opposed to the deconstructed volumes I had been working on for a few years.

This direction was reinforced on a visit to The Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg where I came upon a Malevich sculpture titled "Alpha Architecton”. It is entirely white, solid, geometric and of a single material. I was struck by the simplicity of material and the complexity of form. I saw in it a parallel to the hydrostone components in my wire tangles and decided to investigate this shared concern.

Fused with this realization is a fascination with architectonic structures and memories of growing up with an architect father who was always renovating the many houses we lived in. The processes of constructing things has always been integrated into my life.

Combine this desire to build with recent observation on my daily walks along the river where I live. I see large quantities of earth being removed leaving voids in the landscape. In those voids systems of concrete forms are developed. This concrete casting process has influenced my thinking in the studio. I make molds that are filled with liquids that solidify, in this case hydrostone and beeswax. To make the molds the thinking and forming process is the reverse of the final form and the molds are destroyed in the process of casting and de-molding. The molds are far more complex structures than the sculptures.

The color pools inside the sculptures are in part references to my early attempts to use color on sculpture in the form of pigmented wax. In the current efforts the wax and hydrostone basins could be a reference to both pools in architectural situations or the container held in the Chacmool figures of Mesoamerican Art. The pools being a substitute for the Chacmool's container of sacrificial offerings exist at the boundaries between the physical and mystical realms. Other structures, such as the Inca Moray Ruins in Peru with its terraced stone depressions, or the Hoover Dam with its concrete mass pressed against the reservoir of water, are influential as well.”