Monica Van den Dool

Still Lifes

This body of work is inspired by the genre of still life painting (functioning traditionally as a reminder of mortality) and particularly by the compositions of Chardin. Simplified but realistic representations of game animals are forcefully combined and contrasted with cartoonishly glazed and artificially bright and vibrant elements (dripping oranges, bright yellow canaries, flowing drips). The glazed elements are generally pushed into the wet clay of the larger sculpture, and the entire sculpture is dried, fired, and re-fired together, resulting in many cracks and stresses. This process and the whole jarring composition are meant to correlate with the complexity and strain of our attempt to understand our mortality in its entirety.

Ghosts

The ghosts represents another way of addressing the struggle to come to terms with our mortality and the the lack or existence of a spiritual dimension. In a childish solution, the figures simply dress themselves up like ghosts with sheets over their heads. Their efforts are as futile as my own attempts to sculpt something amorphous and immaterial from a material as heavy and permanent as clay.

Monkeys

Sinister primates make the case for coming to terms with our own baser instincts, while simultaneously aspiring to some higher plane of existence. Part hero and part villain, engaged in often ambiguous and always suspicious undertakings, the monkeys describe the limits of evolution and magnify our own struggles to define our humanity.

Army Men

The generic army man is a toy that children play with to act out war scenarios (obviously and inevitably involving death and killing). My scaled-up renditions of the subject take things a step farther by removing the toy’s normal death-dealing poses and attributes and replacing them with more benign and pleasant activities.