Tony Tasset

Tony Tasset has a Spaniel’s nose for pop conceptualism. His work references modernism, pop culture, mass marketing, and everyday consumerism to simultaneously reinforce and undermine the outsize beauty and absurdity of the American visual vernacular. Never is this truer than when the artist’s projects become public art—witness, for instance, his three-story fiberglass Eye that watches over downtown Dallas, or his 30-foot statue of a despondent Paul Bunyan that pays sad tribute to manifest destiny in University Park, IL. Blown up and weatherproofed to brave the great outdoors, the sculptor’s supersized but familiar figures inhabit their own uncanny valley.

Working in a similarly unsettling vein, Tasset labored until early February over a set of modest-to-large scale works meant to respond to the anxiety of our times. These went on view in February 28 at Kavi Gupta gallery in Chicago. When contacted to participate in Life During Wartime, Tasset thought to respond to America’s post-pandemic reality by highlighting the largest of his newest works, Crow. He did so by Photoshopping a rapacious-looking 10-foot sculpture into a photograph of Alexander Calder’s 53-foot cherry red Flamingo, which has long been sited in Chicago’s Federal Plaza. A shadowy totem of dystopian modernism, Crow writ monumental makes its own statement about public sculpture today: the times (ought to) get the statues they justly deserve.

— CVF, USFCAM