Art and Design Commons^™

Ronald Gonzalez: Private Collection, Shannon Egan

Schmucker Art Catalogs

In Ronald Gonzalez’s latest series of sculptures, old leather satchels, small antiquated appliances, dulled tools, bicycle handles, shoes, a fencing mask, an accordion, a bicycle seat, a toaster and helmets, among other various found parts and outdated detritus are combined to evoke the heads and torsos of human-like forms. The viewer identifies the components at once as what the objects literally are as well as the specific body parts they figuratively describe. As such, his art calls for an exercise in perceptual shifts that allow for more than one visual interpretation. While some objects are manipulated, others are left intact, …

Id, Shannon Egan

Schmucker Art Catalogs

The five sculptors in ID challenge the conventions of representational self-portraiture. In their selective and often abstract use of figuration, these artists engage the identification of self as it is situated socially and institutionally—one’s “I.D.”—as well as the psychoanalytic dimensions of the “id.”

The exhibition’s title introduces a kind of paradoxical conflict between public identification, found in various bureaucratic forms of I.D. (passports, drivers’ licenses, and Social Security numbers, for example), and the id, a Freudian classification for the most basic and unconscious physical drives (sex, food, aggression).

All of these artists respond to the seeming incongruities of I.D. and …