— Apr 9, 11:28 AM — 

The Investigator

Thursday, April 10
Room 125 | 12:30 pm

Gay Outlaw began her art career as a photographer. In recent years she’s turned to sculpture, which has allowed her to expand her artistic investigations, bringing them into 3-D. Outlaw creates patterns and optical illusions that give the impression that the surfaces of her sculptures move, their shapes seeming to metamorphose as the viewer moves around the works. Using vernacular materials like pencils, chalk, or segments of drain hoses filled with plaster, she has produced a series of brilliantly simple works that reveal her fundamental belief in the value of craft. These abstracted forms possess an ornate complexity of surface, yet they take the ordinary shapes of cubes, spheres and stairs.

The San Francisco Chronicle writes, “Some years ago, Gay Outlaw began making sculptural objects penetrated by cylindrical holes. They looked as if the grid implicit in so much early minimalist art had gone corrosive and bored its way through her things from surface to surface.” Art in America calls her work, “quirky, strange, and just-right.”

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