“I try to make art which celebrates doubt and uncertainty. Which provokes answers but doesn’t give them. Which withholds absolute meaning by incorporating parasite meanings. Which suspends meaning while perpetually dispatching you toward interpretation, urging you beyond dogmatism, beyond doctrine, beyond ideology, beyond authority.”
B y appropriating images and objects that are deeply embedded in our shared cultural lexicon, Sherrie Levine rewrites history. The artist purposefully questions our habit of attributing meaning to well known images by recontextualizing what is familiar. Executed in 2010, Tree Bark Mask falls in line with this generative approach to history, redefining its frame of reference through material and form.
The present work is exemplary of Levine’s recent work, consisting of bronze and glass sculptures of animal and human skulls. A tree bark mask cast in bronze, this work generates new connotations and interpretations, its resolute surface antithetical to rough, mutable bark. Levine’s concern for these subjects—all adjacent to the cerebral—feels telling, especially the creation of masks and skulls. While they signal the existence of a sentient being, they ultimately are devoid of life. The tension between the lasting weight of bronze and the lack of life in these forms renders them endlessly compelling, lifeless yet enduring.