1971 -
American
Beer Can Leg
carved and painted wood
on verso titled and dated 2006 on a label
52 x 28 x 19 in, 132.1 x 71.1 x 48.3 cm
Estimate: $6,000 - $8,000 CAD
Preview at: Heffel Toronto – 13 Hazelton Ave
PROVENANCE
Zach Feuer Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Toronto
EXHIBITED
Kantor/Feuer Gallery, Los Angeles, Brad Kahlhamer & Aaron Spangler, August 16 - September 23, 2006
Deeply influenced by his upbringing in northern Minnesota, where he is still based, Aaron Spangler is known for his meditations on the intricacies of rural life, expressed in deeply carved wooden sculptures and bas-reliefs. Painted in black gesso and rubbed with graphite, the surreal, monochromatic scenes resonate with a sense of foreboding calamity, paranoia, and the mundane disasters of country living. Nostalgia, too, permeates his work, and in his forested junk piles and busted artefacts we can find the same youthful, cigarettes-and-throwing-rocks exurb wistfulness that is often found in the paintings of Kim Dorland. Beer Can Leg depicts a strange pastiche with its a contortion of tree roots, log cabins and discarded shoes, but there is an air of the monumental here - or at least a blend of the sacred with the profane. The title's beer can-turned-prosthetic leg is echoed by the subsequent shapes of a thin obelisk and a totem pole carved into a tree trunk, while a mask-like box that tops the structure lends something of a human scale. Tactile and richly symbolic, Spangler's sculptures explore the ineffable truths and complex mythologies of the rural ethos.
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