Allen Topolski

We imbue our basic requirements of survival with meaning through proximity, ownership and design. There are few objects as rich in meaning as those we live with. They attest to our desires, taste, and socio-economic status; they are indicants of the personal and the cultural. My work speaks through the familiarity of the home where a technology that requires the intimacy of touch lends itself primarily to convenience and where materials of our everyday entwine perpetually with the memories and associations of our experiences. I draw upon images, objects, and materials to form reliquaries of conscious and unconscious associations to the past. My art is simultaneously a metaphor for my present domestic situation and an attempted apprehension of my history - a history pursued through the flawed suppositious act of memory.

The works in the appliance series are more fabricated artifacts than sculpture; they are allusions to the familiar more than venerations to the precious uncommon. Through the incorporation of found appliance parts and designs from the 1950's and '60's they address a period specific technology. These works invoke the commercial or production aesthetic of a time prior to planned obsolescence, when production held precedence over consumption and design reflected clearly its milieu. The perceived affordances my sculptures share with everyday objects establish a degree of viability with the viewer but closer examination prompts a violation of the expected and the lack of function and struggle of recognition connects to a loss associated with memory. The Pedestal Series uses the storage and display of objects as a metaphor for how we construct recollections and how objects and materials retain history. The domestic space and the exhibition space intersect in these works where material aligns with memory and display connects to narrative. These works and their construction define the place where something, now absent, once rested and hint at where it has gone.

Images (and art) are often formed to summon appearances of something that is absent. Simulating the 'real,' as I do, feigns what I do not have and what the viewer is enticed to look for. The work, in a way, can never fulfill its intention - each piece existing as a surrogate for that which is missing.