A Fitting Conclusion- Temporarily Unavailable Sculpture

Valerie Wilcox is a mixed-media, sculpture and installation artist living in Los Angeles, CA. Valerie Wilcox’s “Constructs," present a reimagined, abstracted understanding of our constructed environment and how our brain works to piece together diverse elements. She uses common and salvaged materials to intuitively impose harmony on elements that may not be naturally susceptible to it. Her works consistently explore contradictions and uneasy associations between indefinable shapes, marks and the activity of painting. These assembled hybrid objects become her canvas and manage to transcend their base materiality, as her source materials are elevated and imbued with a newness of form and aesthetic. Wilcox’s practice combines the analytical geometries of Minimalism with the spontaneous spirit of the New Casualists. Her works are always distinguishable by their unorthodox and joyful approach to color and form. Her working process incorporates the ideals of Wabi Sabi. This aesthetic is centered on the acceptance and beauty of transience and imperfection. It refers to quirks and anomalies arising from the process of construction, which add uniqueness and elegance to both natural and man-made objects. The visible evidence of the maker’s hand, the odd assembly and disjointed mechanics in the works reveal her process and addresses our ideals of perfection versus inherent human fallibility. She embraces the mistakes and gives them a new life, with bits and pieces that appear as if they were casually cobbled together, off-kilter and with an imperfect resolution. She likes pushing a surreal quality in her work. Ambiguous and quirky shapes hover between a two-dimensional plane and a three-dimensional structure, often nuanced by the effects of light and shadow, thus playing with the idea of space and perception, but not necessarily the reality of it. Wilcox's Constructs at once become referential, whimsical and self-reflexive. It has often been said that her work feels like poetry– subtle, nuanced and open to interpretation.