Karl Saliter: Sculptor at Large

Here is a new piece, an 8′ dollar bill described in stones, which I’m making for an “Art and Industry” show in Pittsfield, MA.

“Making Money”, seen below, was accepted into the “Art and Industry” show in Pittsfield, MA, for May 30th. Now I just have to build it.

This just in: Artist Jeff Perrot
http://www.jeffperrott.com/
wrote an excellent essay about my sculpture and the process. Here it is:

Karl Saliter’s Lightness of Being

Some sculptors work the sublime heavy. You know their names: Serra, DeSuvero, Smith – even Holt and Smithson and Kapoor and Irwin and Turrell can join the parade, for any lightness their work produces for the viewer is often bracketed by the sublimity of mass, their ponderous processes, and their overarching ambitions for transcendence.

Karl Saliter, on the other hand, works the sublime light. His stone and steel sculptures and granite and marble carvings occupy nature’s and man’s architecture with a touch that defies and transforms our presuppositions of these materials, lifting us upward with a kind of zen-like vertigo.

Encountered in a field, in the gallery round, or as one of the artist’s recent architecture-defining wallworks, Saliter perches bulbous found and/or gently carved boulders of granite and marble atop or along spindly strings of thin steel bar. By placing volume, mass and line in gravity-defying relation to each other, he challenges viewers to reconsider their own relation to the solid earth and open sky.

Even in his large-scale outdoor work, Saliter manages to extract the weight from the stone. The artist’s often giant boulders seem to be injected with pure helium as they reach skyward, tethered gently and whimsically by the long, slightly bent, curving steel poles that seem—rather than supporting them—to be pushing them along, pointing them to a stellar destination.

But the artist isn’t simply turning the heavy into its opposite, or reversing the poles of gravity; he’s turning it inside out. In fact it seems his materials never had the weight and mass we usually ascribe to them. One trip to river’s edge with the artist will show you why.

Ellsworth Kelly once said, “…seeing is drawing…” For Kelly, an artist’s sensibility, approach, sensitivity, and symbiotic relation to his subject are most of art’s battle – the hand, then, simply and easily follows, virtually tracing what the soul has already blueprinted.

Intuiting Kelly’s hard-won knowledge, Saliter draws his stones from the bed of the river coursing its way along the front of his Connecticut home, using a divining rod of the soul perched midpoint between Duchamp’s non-choice and Picasso’s seizure of the moment. This is the point of lightness from which Saliter sees his stones not only as they are, but also in their potential for transformation. Collaborating with million-year geology, the river current’s sculpting craft, and past human forces that altered his terrain, Saliter works for the perfect catch – the stone or stones that catch him off-balance, dictating to him their right to art, to receive from the artist the alchemical work that will set them free.

And so the work begins, from drilling the stones to the choice, calibration, bending, and placing of the metal rods, to the careful balancing of line and mass with nature’s context and man’s presuppositions of what they are and what they mean. Saliter’s process builds no mere gestalt, no simple reduction of the parts to an easily-sought whole. For Saliter the work doesn’t end until he finds in his placement of elements, his attachment of parts, an expansion of consciousness that resists the temptation to simply, formally classify them.

As the elongated metal rods bend precipitously, as his stones lean or reach awkwardly away from their gravity line, lurching with unseen force toward some unidentifiable pole, and as a grouping of elements hangs precariously between chance scattering and formal choice, Saliter’s best works work an uncanny effect on viewers, forcing a spiraling question about the very ground we take for granted.

So, as we list and feel ourselves beside and above ourselves in confronting Saliter’s interrogation of nature’s law, unable to grasp again the gravity we relied on a moment ago, our precious attachment to the weight and mass our bodies depend on becomes clear. In the final analysis, Saliter seems to gives us no choice but to let go of our sandbags, and feel ourselves embraced and overcome by a vertiginous drop into the heavens, inverted and reinvented in our relation to air.

Jeff Perrott
2005-2009

Here is an installation completed last fall for the Wassaic Project show, “Fueled Overtones”.  The work explores our relationship to shelter, sanctification, and sacred space.

This just in from Carl Van Brunt, owner of  Van Brunt Gallery, Beacon:

“The Tonka was by far the most popular piece in the show. People were just jaw-dropping amazed. Lots asked if you are doing other things in this vein. You reached folks across the spectrum of education, age and sophistication. No small accomplishment.”

Here are some images from an installation this week at Florida Atlantic University.  We had to cut this piece into three parts to fit it in the building.  Installation took 15 hours with heroic partner Terri.  We’re recovering in the sun now, avoiding the ice storms back home.

NY Times…

If you scroll down a bit to the “Arts” section, that granite Tonka is my creation, (and I even get named!!!)

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/nyregion/westchester/index.html

Here’s an image of the piece shown.

How nice to get this review of a fall installation in Charlottesville, VA.

http://artpark.typepad.com/artblog/reviews/

I am posting regularly on the recent placement of the 2008-2009 ArtInPlacepublic sculptures along the byways of Charlottesville. Please follow me in this series as I give you a little tour…

The viewer/sculptor interface is what I build for, and that is reflected in all of my work. I am concerned that people see my creations, touch them, and live with them. The pieces I create are distinct resting places for souls on a journey. Ideally, they are something your soul has not encountered before. What I create is informed by, yet free of, time before this moment.

These are the words of Connecticut sculptor, Karl Saliter, describing his body of work. In his AIP piece titled Particle Wave (located on McIntire Road near the 250 Bypass on the Schenk’s Branch Greenway), Karl has assembled steel and rocks to create one of the few pieces that call for direct interaction. It is located on a pedestrian walkway on purpose. Particle Wave invites people to interrupt their journey, get close, see how it’s made, and, most importantly, get inside. Other sculptures are generally appreciated from afar.

Specifically about the creation of Particle Wave Karl says this:

Particle Wave was a lot of fun to make.  Interactivity is the focus.  I want people to come inside this unique place, and experience the environment. To touch the stones, to lay on their backs, and look at the sky through a whirl of rocks.

 

I’m looking at wave and particle behavior through the very solid stones, and through what is called the negative space around them.

The 8 foot cube is made of various lengths of steel rebar. The cube is then filled with a sphere. The sphere is made of a series of stones attached to the ends of steel rods. Nice technique. My favorite impression of the piece is coming to grips with how sensual the curve of the stone sphere is. After entering inside through the one-sided opening, I completely lost sense of the cold, hard materials enveloping me. Not until after I reached out to touch the beautiful stones was I brought back to appreciate their cold, hard surface.

This is a wonderful piece. I encourage everyone to stop their cars, get out and interact with it. It is so much more than just a geometrical puzzle.