OSHARA VILLAGE INSTALLATION - ARTIST STATEMENT – ROB RIKOON

For the last fifty years, I have dedicated some of each day to make art. Excellent drawing skills and craftsmanship are key to creating pieces that the general public can relate to and this has always been my primary audience as an artist. Art, like religion, speaks to the innermost parts of each of us as human beings and this is a place where we connect, no matter what our background or training. Moving between 2 and 3 dimensions or visual arts to writing is something I do naturally.  My current painted steel sculptures are the culmination of all my training and creative  accomplishments of the past brought to bear on the present moment.

The Rikoon Studio produces medium to large size steel sculptures made out of industrial components such as pipes, square tubes and recycled materials from local structural  steel fabrication shops. The artist, Rob Rikoon, is assisted by a production manager, Sherm Tarnoff, a shop technician, Brad Gray and one our studio’s welding interns, Dominic Montoya.  Together, we produce figurative, multi layered painted sculptures that have internal movement and life, with the goal of being relatable to  the general public. The current series, of which three are on display at the sculpture park next to Dos Pantry on Richards Avenue, are representations of practitioners of the world’s five major religious traditions.  The first of the four is located at the Haywood Street Methodist Church in Asheville, NC.

The first of the series is a non-traditional 15’ high crucifixion located outside a landmark church in Asheville, North Carolina, which is the major source of food and other forms of care for the homeless and indigent population of the area. It faces a major highway interchange and the Rikoon Studio’s intentional restriction of its vocabulary to the use of steel pipes and square tubes as well as cast off industrial parts is meant to viscerally deliver the message that industrial materials (and their associated technology) have become so integral to modern human life that the natural physique can as well represented by geometric components as traditional representations of bone and flesh.  The reason we did the crucifixion first was because it is one of the best known sculptural images in western civilization, it serves to establish our vocabulary in the public’s mind.

The three sculptures at the Oshara Village sculpture park are a Muslim kneeling on a prayer rug, a Jewish rabbi holding the scrolls of the Torah, and a seating relaxed Buddhist, the embodiment of compassion.  The Muslim and the Jewish rabbi are meant to be seen together, in juxtaposition because for both these religions, practitioners are not supposed to look directly  at God and so their eyes are averted, either facing the ground or covered.  The Buddhist statue, the fourth in the series, is based on a traditional but uncommon “at total ease” or relaxed pose which is far different then the stiff idealized upright posture that most people associate with representations of the perfect attainment of wholeness and complete absorption in meditation.

The fifth and final sculpture of the series is a large (10’ to 20’ high) dancing figure (loosely based on Shiva, the Hindu god/goodness of creation/destruction) is neither male nor female.  It  will be equally interesting  from all 360° viewpoints around the traffic circle. 

The inspiration for this series is that most people have an interest in knowing more about the personas of ascended masters, whether or not one practices one the world‘s traditional religions or not, it is of wide spread interest that they are united by a common theme of individual prayer and active service to others. The Rikoon Studio feels that art should be accessible to each of Santa Fe’s citizens, no matter how much or little arts education they have received.