VICTORIA DEBLASSIE

I found discarded Encyclopedia Britannicas from my birth year in front of my apartment when I first moved to San Francisco. I wanted my chance encounter to become other people’s synchronistic event. I bounded the books together and sandwiched them between two cut circular pieces of plywood I also found. I started to read people’s fortunes from this sculpture. I would tell a person to ask a question they needed advice on in their life, not tell me it, roll the wheel till they bonded with it, stick their hand in a random place, and I would read their fortune.

I discovered two chairs and plywood in a dumpster. I wanted to engage people’s bodies in a different way when they are sitting on a chair. In a chair, bodies are stagnant. By placing the chair on opposite sides of the plywood wheel facing away from each other, the participants are engaged in a crab walk mode of locomotion.

I found plywood on the street. Being a sculptor that is reliant on heavy machinery, I was feeling jealous of the painters and draftsmen that could work in their art in the beautiful parks of San Francisco. I decided to make a sculpture that I could make endless sculptures from through the reconfiguration of the slotted circles. I would take urban walkabouts in an Francisco and I would take the portable sculpture apart when I found an interesting form I wanted to mimic, such as the slanted trees and the fence in the images presented.

Stare at each other.