Ross Bell - Sculpture

Upon entering the gallery, viewers will be confronted with an eight foot 'hypercube', invited to interact with the obstructed space, and lured into stepping inside it. With left over materials from art packers' strip-crates and ubiquitous housing construction materials, the artist has built a series of exaggerated cubes, which playfully confound perceptions. It is a quirky, tongue-in-cheek exercise typical of Bell's ongoing and lovingly crafted explorations of twentieth century modernist sculpture. By reshaping enclosed visual space and creating a metaphysical conjunction of axes with maple and mirror, walnut and stainless steel, the viewer's presence is both sneakily erased and momentously evoked. Such personal dislocation draws on viewer-object interaction by appropriating notions of Smithson’s dislocation, Judd’s concerns for reductive form and Brancusi’s exploration of space.