Walker Response
I chose to look at a piece called “Unpainted Sculpture� that was created by Charles Ray in 1997. It is a real size sculpture of a 1991 Pontiac Grand Am created from fiber glass and paint. Ray bought he car from a salvage auction, and it appears as depicted in the sculpture that it was in a frontal collision accident.
The reason I chose this work was because it caught my eye in that fact that it was rather large and looked extremely real, other than it having a gray dull paint color painted across every inch of it. It was extremely detailed. While the back half of the car remained completely untouched, the front end and its engine were impacted and smashed inward towards the front seats. The driver door was smashed. The hood of the car had been crumpled together and pushed into the windshield. The front bumper was still clinging on even though it appeared completely dismantled. With all this detail and special attention given on this piece of work, it was hard for me to visualize this actually being a sculpture, but rather a real car that one might be looking at in the crash site.
It was stated at his piece of work that Charles Ray makes something that is so abstract it becomes real and so real that it becomes abstract. I believe he does this very well and in turn creates a power piece of artwork to look at.