JOSHUA WOODLEE at Royal Mastodon Society

Sculptor Joshua Woodlee turns cast bronze, cast iron, fabricated steel, and found objects into sculptures of exquisite and timeless beauty. His masterful orchestration of proportion, substance and texture exerts a graceful, yet forceful presence in the space surrounding each piece.

Woodlee's surfaces are fire-roasted and physical: forged and fused, torch-cut and tortured into sensuous curves and fractal-like fissures, with edges ripped, melted and ground into submission.

From an acute sense for tactile materiality, to a subtle sense of humor, intelligence pervades Woodlee's work. His work is not representational, yet some works seem to embody ancient lava flows across barren extraterrestrial landscapes; other works evoke a subtle feeling of anthromorphic gesture, as if visitors from a parallel universe were communicating in a long-forgotten language.

Woodlee's work occupies a magical realm between iron and imagination. Both weighty and weightless, the work traces an arcing trajectory that both magnifies and defies the gravitational forces of earth-bound attraction.

Indeed, to be in the presence of Woodlee's hand wrought heavy metal is to be in the presence of a very, very... strange attractor.


Copyright © 2010, Royal Mastodon Society, LLC. All rights reserved.