Close Menu
Headshot of Sam Agnew

Artist Statement

In my practice, I work with speculation. Any relationship to a symbol is expansive. I like to devise certain techniques that allow for the experience of a symbol to be open, whether that is confusion, humour, ambiguity or comparison.

My recent work is directed towards the symbolic construction of space. Within the city, one endures a constant manipulation of experience. Built spaces are intrinsically masculine in this way. All symbols are experienced in both physical and nonphysical space. A goal of my work is to enamour a binary cognizance of inside and out, reality and imagination, negative and positive, and so forth. Sometimes this becomes particularly social, other times it seems apolitical.

I am particularly interested in animal semiology, simply because animals are ambiguous. They are perceptively thought-of and maneuvered by humans, Berger said that "the first metaphor was animal". Yet animals also have their own perceptions, which they carry secretively. Lastly, I am concerned with the silence of language. Unlike things, language produces a continual removal. Any speculation is mediated by personal and logical translations. Silence provides a vital platform for interpretation.

Project Statement

My video, “The Pirelli Tire Building”, follows a comparative structure with 3 distinct sections. The video’s focus is the Pirelli Tire Building, a now-defunct building located in New Haven inside an Ikea parking lot. The first section compares the social history of the building to the aspirational writings of its architect, Marcel Breuer. The second section compares Breuer’s notions of space to the film techniques of Pixar, which embalm a sense of utopian wonder. The third section displays 3D-rendered language-objects with Pixarian furs, an amalgamation of space and imagination through a nostalgic lense. 

The exhibit is encircled by a wall of tiny beeswax blocks, called “Bee Wall”. The insignia on each block resembles an anthropomorphized bee in the stance of Da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’. Like how ‘Vitruvian Man’ signified an architecture taken from the male body, these ‘Vitruvian Bees’ signify an architecture taken from anthropomorphized bees. As symbols, Bees have inspired a kind of utopian thinking around architecture (Vessel in Hudson Yards). But in practice the human construction of space kills bees (pesticides), and the bee construction of space kills humans (the recent suicide at Vessel in Hudson Yards).  

My sculpture, “Gatorade Vessel with Giant Squid”, is a laundry basket coated in skin-tone silicone rubber and filled with Gatorade (Glacier Freeze). A small 3D print of the Giant Squid, inspired by the Mario Blooper, floats on the surface of the Gatorade. The iconographical history of the Giant Squid--especially its distinct ability to evade human rationalization-- has made it a poignant symbol for human pathos. This sculpture can be considered within two distinct spatial frameworks. First, the banal intimacy of a laundry basket, its bodily curvatures, eerily coated in a rubber which appear as skin: the body. Like being inside the consumer, with the blood of gatorade and the heart of a giant squid. Second, it appears as the representational model of a massive structure, sort of like the Truman Show-- a massive creature lost within an expansive, crystal-blue ocean. 

Email: sam.c.agnew@gmail.com

Image
Artwork by Sam Agnew - Vitruvian Bees (Bee Wall)
Caption
cast beeswax, 40' x 6" (wall), 3" x 4" (each bee), 2020
Image
Artwork by Sam Agnew - Gatorade Vessel with Giant Squid
Caption
laundry basket, pigmented silicone rubber, gatorade (Glacier Freeze), 3D print (PLA plastic), 2' x 2' x 4', 2020
Close Menu