Peter Shelton
Peter Shelton's sculptures erase the boundaries between the inanimate and the organic. Born in 1951 in Ohio, Shelton obtained his MFA from UCLA in 1979. His 1980 installation, BIRDHOUSEholecan clearly established the direction of his subsequent work. The sculpture places viewers in paradoxical situations of what is confining and what is liberating. 1983's MAJORJOINTS hangers and squat was "like getting all your toys out as a kid, spreading them out, ordering them and meditating on their significance," in Shelton's own words. A cast-iron belly, femurs, and other objects of varying representational degree hang in an open space. Viewers become participants as they interact with the objects and create connections, create the art. More recently, 1998's blackelephanthouse put two objects that physically resemble some hitherto-unknown body organ, but that by virtue of their scale - twenty feet long, ten feet wide and ten feet tall - defy any attempt to comfortably perceive them as distinct objects that could be recomposed into an organic body. His work also encompasses smaller-scale sculptural pieces, which bring the same types of organic shapes that populate his installations into a more intimate scale.
