Pillory Dervish

Multimedia Sculpture.

Wood; Plaster; Aluminum, Found and repurposed objects; Motors; Audio equipment with looping soundtrack; Rotating stand.

48" high x 30" x 30"

Please turn up volume for audio

Pillory dervish is a rotating multimedia assemblage combining sculpted figures, found objects, miniature constructions, mechanical components, and recorded spoken narration. Mounted on a revolving stand, the sculpture presents two contrasting aspects. One side features a grinning, masklike face framed by angular reliefs, crossed by a hefty bar from which dangle shoe extenders, in lieu of the hands restrained by the medieval torture device. Ensconced below them, a motorized karmic wheel drives the rotary motion of a repurposed four-brush, geared mop component. On the opposite side, the suggestion of a squatting figure with incongruously small hands resting on provisional knees offers an irreverent variation on the seated Lincoln of the Washington memorial, towering above an inverted skull that emerges from the dark, nestlike recess below. The base is populated by miniature architectural fragments suggesting settlements or ruined environments whose scale is at odds with the amalgam of the figures above. As the sculpture revolves, its independently moving components and continuous narration accompany the alternating appearances of its two sides. The title brings together the pillory, an instrument of public humiliation and restraint, and the whirling dervish, whose rotation belongs to a devotional practice. These apparently opposed rituals converge in a contraption that is simultaneously an apparatus of confinement and an agent of its own movement. The handles suggest manipulation, the miniature environments evoke domains of control, and the parody of the statesman unsettles the monumental conventions through which authority acquires its familiar dignity. Meanwhile, the karmic wheel's unlikely employment of a mop brush brings cosmic pretension into comic proximity with domestic routine. Neither aspect assumes a definitive identity, and through its continuous rotation and spoken accompaniment, the assemblage performs an incongruous ceremony in which spectacle, authority, horror, and ridicule whirl in rhythmic abandon.

Full revolution of kinetic sculpture with a fragment of the looping recited narration.