Dave Cole, an artist known for his ambitious, public sculptures, including excavators that knit an enormous American Flag with utility poles, a story-high toxic teddy bear, and a bridge tagged with florescent knit camouflage, has produced a somber, reflective body of work for his NYC debut titled, Unreal City. It is a body of work that draws inspiration from modernist literature, demonstrates his signature material rigor, and provokes contradictory, reflective readings. Military tank treads, fired bullets, United Nations Flags, ... Read more

Dave Cole, an artist known for his ambitious, public sculptures, including excavators that knit an enormous American Flag with utility poles, a story-high toxic teddy bear, and a bridge tagged with florescent knit camouflage, has produced a somber, reflective body of work for his NYC debut titled, Unreal City. It is a body of work that draws inspiration from modernist literature, demonstrates his signature material rigor, and provokes contradictory, reflective readings.

Military tank treads, fired bullets, United Nations Flags, and shotguns are some of the materials that Cole deconstructs and re-purposes for this laborious body of work. Despite the political content that is both literally and conceptually integral to Cole’s sculptures, Cole is not proposing an argument. In fact, a driving intent in his work is his commitment to reflect multiple perspectives that are often contrasting.

Cole’s new work is about history, war, and industrialization. However, if there is an omniscient subject directing the show, it is this: Time erases and renews all things. The title, Unreal City, is a direct reference to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, addressing the brutal, yet impartial course of time, an agent of birth and death. It is about the permeability of grandeur, the temporality of human accomplishment. The subject of the rise and the fall also brings to mind American Hudson River painter, Thomas Cole. His series of paintings titled “Course of Empire,” depict the transition of a landscape from untouched nature, to increased development, to an erected city, to the destruction of its monuments and buildings, and finally, to the return of nature. Human contribution, and human vulnerability to the impartial course of life, is the crux of this exhibition.