In Kevin Robb’s latest sculpture in his Calypso series, Calypso #62, three red and curving panels connected by stainless fastenings, each with different designs etched into the surface, hang together to create a shape pleasing to the eye and yet still evocative to the viewer.
A sea of floating scripts, a shower of roses, a microscopic stream of blood. What do they have in common?
Take the Lingo sculptures –both made of stainless steel, 34 and 50 inches in height respectively. They feature two ribbons of solid steel surrounded and connected by other ribbons of steel with letters cut out of them. The letter ribbons playfully dance around them and create a world for just those two.
You’ve seen it. There’s something of a mystery about it. How could three be so unique yet incomplete without the other two? Together they are stronger. Take just even one away and an empty space is left that changes the other two and makes them somehow lesser than they were.
Three is powerful!
Because lingo, after all, are usually foreign words spoken by a specific group of people. It is something that is unique to one place or community, and even to one relationship. We all have words or phrases that mean something different with the ones that we love, our own special jargon that we wouldn’t share with anyone else.
It is an artist’s work to inspire the world. Nothing can quite soothe and uplift the soul like a thing of beauty. It speaks a word of understanding and hope that sometimes no one could quite communicate to the grieving or sorrowful. And Kevin’s sculpture Fountain Spirit II does just that. This 12 foot stainless steel structure lifts its own arms to the sky in praise.
