Halsey Rodman
Halsey Rodman’s sculptures and drawings engage with the mythology of the artist. Through his use of eclectic materials, text, and abstraction, Rodman’s works describe the creative process, illustrating asomatous thought as physical form. Converging the austere aesthetics of formalism with a playful theatricality, Rodman’s I Am Turning Into Mist is composed of a light bulb placed atop a hexagonal ‘plinth’. Evolving a witty and complex narrative, the base is suggestive of minimalist sculpture, a lighthouse, or a circus stage: positing art as spectacle, the artist as ‘navagator’, and framing the cartoon emblem of ‘bright idea’ as an elevated object within itself. Standing barely 1 meter high, and adorned with the title text, the piece conjurers a sense of magic, hopefulness, and fallibility.
Navigator Two is a piece that was specially commissioned by the Saatchi Gallery. The coincidental timing of this commission played an integral part of the sculpture’s concept, allowing Rodman to recreate a 2006 event and sculpture titled Navigator, where in creating a self-portrait he employed 12 people to act as ‘multipliers’, each making 2 body parts that were later used to construct 2 figures. The body of Navigator was assembled on 2 separate tiers, physically creating a mirrored image. Using this idea of doubling, Rodman staged the making of Navigator Two exactly one year to the date of the first event, using the same people in the same clothes. The resulting sculpture is not an exact duplicate; its subtle differences record a repeated visual form and the action of its construction. Through collaboration Rodman engages with the concept of self-portrait (or experience of self) as a fabrication of external perception. As Rodman explains:"The fragmented vision of the multipliers mirrors our own experience of our body. Though we can apprehend our body in reflection, the direct experience of our body feels completely different. It is fragmentary, somewhat awkward and definitely at odds with the way we perceive others to perceive us as a unified form."
