New Orleans
“Out of my own great woe,” wrote Heinrich Heine, “I make my little songs.” Analogous to the German writer’s transformation of “woe” into poetry, Christopher Saucedo turns natural disasters into prankish sculpture. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina flooded his home in New Orleans, leaving the living space covered with “exotic, colorful mold.” In 2011, soon after he moved to New York, Hurricane Sandy flooded his house and studio in Rockaway Beach, Queens. These catastrophes nonetheless are but grist for Saucedo’s comic mill. Distant echoes of Pop art and of Magritte inform his latest series, an entertaining spoof of “good” water-in ubiquitous plastic bottles-as opposed to “bad” water-inundations that destroy. Seeing a helicopter drop drinking water to people standing in filthy flood water during the aftermath of Katrina sparked Saucedo’s focal image-oversize painted Styrofoam replicas of plastic water bottles, neither Fiji nor Perrier, but the generic WalMart kind…see the entire review in the print version of June’s Sculpture magazine.
