I'm Carol Bove and this is my studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
And this is where I'm creating the sculptures for The Met facade.
When I was invited to do this commission, the first thing I thought was that I wanted to
make something that related to Art Deco as it manifested throughout the 20th century.
I studied Art Deco and Art Deco jewelry and I wanted to have both an organic,
expressionistic component and then a component that felt geometric.
The circle was an interesting element that was both.
And it has a connection with Art Deco language, but it has a connection with a lot
of different languages, that it can be suggestive of a cosmic system or it can be an
effective mechanical connection point that it's really a machine age shape as much as
it's a timeless shape.
So in addition to looking at Art Deco, I was looking at animation related to Art Deco, I
wanted to make stainless steel sculptures that are abstract forms, both organic and
geometric. And each one has two aluminum discs, and I wanted to have a contrast
between these two elements.
One of the things that I aim to do is make something that has a different quality at
different distances.
I think of scale is a really interesting dimension of sculpture because it's actually
can feel very detachable from the object.
I wanted to make something for the facade that was almost
too big, as if there's a giant that could just crush them into the facade and they overflow a little bit.
And so in order to make something almost too big, I had to build the void, which is the
niche itself.
So there's a full-scale version of the niche in my studio.
The studio has really grown to be able to do this project.
I have a great set of collaborators that I'm working with and most people who work here are
artists, it's really complex to make all the processes fit together.
You know, we do all the fabrication of the sculptures in house.
And there is this real fluidity between the composition, the production engineering and
then the engineering.
It's kind of an amazing feat.
That's the invisible labor.
I wanted to make stainless steel sculptures from industrially available tube stock
material and some aluminum discs. We fabricated a shop press that can compress the
12 by 12 inch stainless steel tubes.
And we've fabricated special dies.
When we press these into the tube, it makes different effects.
So when we're doing an organic conditioning, it's a randomizing process where we're
hitting the corners and we're twisting it. When we're doing the geometric folds.
It's a ninety degree die that we press into the face of the tube.
We use chain hoists to pull these tubes closed and float them using this heavy
equipment to build sort of in the air. They're improvised at this scale so then it
can be assembled with a really light touch.
In these sculptures, the connection points are really important and they're really where a
lot of the romance happens. Where two materials come together
is the sculptural moment.
It's like the erotic moment.
The way that we're welding is on much more the scale of a
bridge. In fact, each individual weld has its own certification.
In the completed sculpture, I want to see the artifact of its being made preserved.
The aluminum discs are each at the same level relative to the facade and
We were concerned about the effect of these mirrored surfaces on the city, on traffic.
We had engineers do a study of the sun and the sun
studies are so beautiful and they really show that they relate to the movement of the sun
and the seasons and the universe.
The title for the commission is The séances aren't helping.
And you can see the title as a frustrated spiritualist engaging with the past and
the past is so problematic.
Or the disgusted materialist who's thinking why do you have to approach this through
magic and superstition
One of the important viewing experiences, I imagine for the sculpture is that you're in
a car and if you're on a one-way street going from north to south.
And you see them in sequence and so there's a pattern of the dots that you read as you go by.
In large buildings, in the classical tradition, it's the
rule rather than the exception that it's completed by people who come after. In this
particular architectural context, the builder would ask for a small figural statue on the
pedestal. To offer something different is inappropriate.
The gesture that I wanted to make would speak to the continuity in the classical tradition
and also talk about the rupture of modernism.
So the object in the niche doesn't really defer to the facade, it actually competes
in this pattern.
There's a different language and a different overarching idea of art, which is the
modernist break.
I scaled the disc elements based on the column diameter and the portraits of
painters in roundels.
This discs that I have made are from a different technological era. You sense their
computer aided geometry. And so they're big and they can catch the wind and they're up in
the air and cantilevered, and depending on where you stand, they disappear into just
nothing. When I design an exhibition, I like to see different amounts of production.
The way that the sculpture attaches to the ground plane looks like a bridge, but
the way that the disc attaches to the tube, it's more like jewelry.
There's a differentiation between those connections, even though they're both very
solid connections.
My experience of them is that they're commanding and elegant and also awkward and
silly and that, you know, that they can be a lot of things and that they don't stand still
for one interpretation.