Buckle
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PROJECT OVERVIEW
Few people would notice the roughly six-inch wide, two-story tall gap between 19th-century buildings across from the loading dock for the State of Ohio administration building called the Rhodes Tower. Yet this is where Black found the potential for creating a sculpture of warped architecture that responds both to the particulars of the site and to the overarching theme of time identified by the program curators. Black’s project is a composite of fragments of architectural details such as dentils and moldings typical of buildings in the area rendered in dense plaster. (The artist modeled the dentils after those on the original Huntington Bank on High Street just south of Broad.) These rest on the brick street at the base of what reads as an avalanche of sorts spilling from the roofline of the buildings. The gesture is clearly metaphorical; this is no fool-the-eye installation meant to suggest that actual masonry has tumbled to the ground. Rather, the stark white of the plaster reads more as a slice of a glacier, an indication of the line Black would like to draw between historical and geologic time. The site for this work is only a block north of the Statehouse, but it is a location full of contrasts that can feel miles away. Here Columbus’s tallest skyscraper, a monument to our identity as the Capital of Ohio, butts up against modest brick buildings on a narrow street reminiscent of European cities. The tug of gravity and the implication of entropy in Buckle juxtaposed with multi-story office towers may remind us that here, as everywhere, change is the only constant.