This week, Tony Tasset‘s Mood Sculpture (2018) was permanently installed in its new home outside of the Gatton Student Center on the campus of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. Local press hailed the arrival of the fiberglass sculpture (which was fabricated for Tasset by FAST Corp in Sparta, Wisconsin), with the Kentucky Kernel calling it a “Big, ‘understandable’ emoji-like sculpture,” and the University of Kentucky News proclaiming it “evokes all the feels.”
The 20-foot tall Mood Sculpture was selected by the UK Student Center Art Committee back in 2018. Tonight (April 25th), Tasset will join UK Art Museum Director Stuart Horodner for an artist talk focusing on “Tasset’s history of making sculptures based on common American experiences – like carving pumpkins and building snowmen – and using scale and materials in surprising ways.”
Writing about the sculpture’s creation, and its arrival on the UK campus, Tasset said:
“I used Constantin Brancusi’s ENDLESS COLUMN as an organizing structure. ENDLESS COLUMN was a monument to the age of mechanical reproduction, an abstraction of the assembly line endlessly repeating the same form. MOOD SCULPTURE is my attempt to make a similar monument to the communication age and with it the study of the mind. I simplified the pain chart to just five emotions and five colors, from the blues at the bottom to the sunny expression on top. A younger generation will think of emoji’s–endless objects and emotions reduced to universally understandable signs. I thought maybe MOOD SCULPTURE could be used as an emotional temperature taker. As a viewer walks by they can check where they rank on any given day, and act accordingly-if they are too close to the bottom it might be time to meditate, exercise or just go back to bed. A University campus seems the perfect location for such a test.”
