The Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum recently paired two sculptors, Blane De St. Croix and Elizabeth Keithline, reinvigorating two tired genres—landscape painting and figurative sculpture. Seven feet tall, about two feet wide, and more than 80 feet long, De St. Croix’s Broken Landscape III is a scale-model re-creation of a 14-mile stretch of the wall being constructed along the U.S./Mexico border near Eagle Pass, Texas. Based on the principles of landscape painting, this miniature landscape sculpture realistically shows the unrealistic nature of the wall. Keithline’s Smarter, Faster, Higher features a series of figures rendered through a black wire matrix that resembles a three-dimensional computer image. Her life-size installation traces human evolution from the Garden of Eden to technological nirvana, or maybe ruin. De St. Croix journeyed 3,000 miles, sketching, photographing, and talking to residents, contractors, border patrol agents, and journalists on both sides of the border to prepare for Broken Landscape III. Extensive research and adventurous travel are integral to his process, but instead of documentation, he produced a meticulously detailed sculpture, reminiscent of a model-train layout, made of plywood and foam in addition to moss, sticks, and other natural materials..…see the entire review in the print version of October’s Sculpture magazine.
