Los Angeles
Ricky Swallow’s work alludes to the real while posing as abstraction. As per the title of his recent exhibition, “Skews,” his intimately scaled bronzes “skew” reality so that their material representation performs a different version of factuality. Interacting with them requires putting into play something the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan referred to as “looking awry.” When you confront these objects directly, objectively, you see a collection of mis- matched, somewhat crudely assembled elements drawn from daily life. But if you look at them from the standpoint of what Lacan considered to be an “interested” or “desiring” view, you see them from a distorted but engaged angle; by sneaking up on them visually, you see invention and re-contextualization. …see the entire review in the print version of April’s Sculpture magazine.
