guns, knives, brass knuckles, is an installation and exhibition of sculpture by New York based artist Robert Lazzarini. All of Robert Lazzarini’s sculptures of the past decade begin with what the artist calls a ‘normative object’. The works in the exhibition start with .38 Smith & Wesson Mode... Read more
guns, knives, brass knuckles, is an installation and exhibition of sculpture by New York based artist Robert Lazzarini. All of Robert Lazzarini’s sculptures of the past decade begin with what the artist calls a ‘normative object’. The works in the exhibition start with .38 Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolver, a set of common kitchen knives (chefs, paring, pruning, cleaver, etc.) and a unembellished pair of brass knuckles. These objects are then subjected to mathematical distortions and fabricated out of the materials that are original to the objects themselves: blued carbon steel and walnut for guns, stainless steel, wood and plastic for knives; and yellow brass for brass knuckles. The combination of these distortions with the lack of any conventionally artistic ‘material translation’ (e.g. a car out of cardboard; flesh out of marble) renders these objects familiar yet strange and difficult, quite literally, to grasp. In canting the gallery’s walls, Lazzarini extends the dislocation exercised on his objects to the space of their display. This altered environment not only further subjects one’s perceptions to a kind of visual slippage, but also connects Lazzarini to a lineage of artists, from Richard Serra to Alberto Giacometti, distinctly concerned with processes of perception and visual abstraction.
