Tony Tasset USA, b. 1960
Snakes (A monument to the eternal battle between truth and fiction), 2020
Plush toy snakes, rubber toy snakes, taxidermied snakes, aluminum wire
24 x 36 x 36 in
60.9 x 91.4 x 91.4 cm
60.9 x 91.4 x 91.4 cm
7448
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Tony Tasset’s Snakes (2020) writhes like a tempestuous sea of taxidermical flesh and plush, a “sacred and profane pop nightmare” blurring the boundary between what’s phony and what’s real. This...
Tony Tasset’s Snakes (2020) writhes like a tempestuous sea of taxidermical flesh and plush, a “sacred and profane pop nightmare” blurring the boundary between what’s phony and what’s real. This work was created for Tasset's 2020 solo exhibition The Weight, at Kavi Gupta gallery in Chicago. For this exhibition, Tasset mined the innermost provinces of the contemporary human psyche, responding to the anxiety of our times with wit, gravitas, and salt-of-the-earth sagacity. Working in his western Michigan studio like an aesthetic Dr. Frankenstein assembling an assortment of Post-Modernist monsters—part Woody Guthrie, part Robert Crumb, part Jeff Koons, part Louise Bourgeois—Tasset has concocted a confident, unified sculptural statement he describes as “a reckoning; an apocalyptic mix-tape.”
A Post-Atomic visual troubadour, Tasset continues to define the vanguard of Pop Conceptualism. From the monumental stoicism of a massive fiberglass Eye sculpture watching over downtown Dallas like a Neo-Surrealist sentinel, to a slumping, exhausted Paul Bunyan that pays sad tribute to manifest destiny gone awry, to the frailty and nuanced melancholy of a to-scale sculpture of a ripped Styrofoam cup, Tasset has demonstrated, time and again, a unique ability to memorialize the peculiar beauty and pathos of the American visual vernacular.
“My art has always responded to the cultural moment, the current zeitgeist,” says Tasset. “The Weight was made in response to the current state of the world. Things are heavy.”
A Post-Atomic visual troubadour, Tasset continues to define the vanguard of Pop Conceptualism. From the monumental stoicism of a massive fiberglass Eye sculpture watching over downtown Dallas like a Neo-Surrealist sentinel, to a slumping, exhausted Paul Bunyan that pays sad tribute to manifest destiny gone awry, to the frailty and nuanced melancholy of a to-scale sculpture of a ripped Styrofoam cup, Tasset has demonstrated, time and again, a unique ability to memorialize the peculiar beauty and pathos of the American visual vernacular.
“My art has always responded to the cultural moment, the current zeitgeist,” says Tasset. “The Weight was made in response to the current state of the world. Things are heavy.”