Artist: Eric Veit
Exhibition title: Humanities
Venue: inge, New York, US
Date: February 11 – April 28, 2024
Photography: All images are Courtesy of the artist and inge, New York
There are five sculptures in this exhibition. They’re mostly things that go; either with their feet or their flippers or their wheels, collected, nailed, clasped, pinned and otherwise assembled into a line of objects that stay put.
The orca was once a squishy rubber toy filled with foam. Perhaps its first maker made it for a dog. The face looked more like a dolphin than an orca so I cut it in half and rebuilt the inside with a piece of wood. The orca might seem deceased but it stands on three points like a good tripod should. The flower makes it the soil in a landscape, or a hat for a lady.
The shopping cart is filled with jar tops and a few wheels. I sometimes save cast offs from consumption instead of throwing them out. They’re markers of the aggregation of time it takes to make something. The lid tops the rain that rained and the carbon that was inhaled by the vine that bore the cucumbers that were brined in the jar of pickles I ended up eating. But the lids are the remnants of what was emptied. So the cart is full of a type of emptiness.
The Jeep came to me with a sparkly beige enamel. I scraped off all the color and took the seats out. I polished a cow’s horn and screwed it on top. It’s a utility vehicle of sorts. A replica of a vehicle that does the job an animal would have done a couple centuries ago. There are a few other additions to it. It’s like a soldier, or a worker, or the vehicle of a soldier, or the vehicle of a worker.
The turtle shell used to have a real turtle inside and the bottle caps are another type of consumption souvenir. They’re arranged to help protect the shell like armor. But they also puncture the shell so they’re protecting as well as injuring, depending on how alive you view the shell to be.
The duck is a decoy, sanded, blackened, and adorned with extra feathers. I found this duck’s turkey feather strewn across the forest floor in upstate New York. The non-feather parts of the turkey had already become part of a different animal. One feather from that turkey became this duck and the duck’s other feather is a torn piece of sandpaper.
