WEIGHT-GRIEF

 

This sculpture by Celeste Roberge has been making the rounds on Facebook. I was completely unfamiliar with her work until I saw the photo on a friend’s wall and did a little research about the art and the artist. There is a brief biography below, the first paragraph is from her own website, the second is from the artist bio page of Eight Modern Sante Fe New Mexico where Roberge has some of her work installed. She has numerous pieces that spoke to me and tell a similarly powerful and multi-layered story of embodiment and manufacturism (believe it or not that is the name of a new contemporary art movement although I am not sure Roberge would use it describe her work I used it innocently to make a comment here).  Perhaps we have all experienced this weight at some time and its durable, intransigent paralysis; a paralysis that is unseen by others and thus its intransigence…I believe art is, in part, the visual representation of what has been previously hidden, ill described, misrepresented, or perhaps unknown. This sculpture brings the weight of grief into the light to be touched and acknowledged  where it will, because it does, become everyone’s shared story.

 

“Celeste Roberge was born in Maine and received her art education at the Maine College of Art, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is Professor Emerita, after twenty-two years as Head of Sculpture, at the School of Art + Art History, College of the Arts, University of Florida. She maintains a studio in South Portland, Maine.”

“…her juxtapositions of fragile furnishings against stark masses of layered stone call to mind the disparate ways in which we view temporality as regards objects of human and organic origins. They center the viewer’s experience on the visceral impact of collided opposites: the fabricated pressed between the organic, the inviting caught in the threatening, and the ephemeral embedded within the enduring….Roberge is also known to create sculptures that engage dynamically with exterior environments. Commonly, these invert the hierarchy of objects established in her larger stacks. In Chaise Gabion, 1,350 pounds of river rocks are compressed into the shape of a chaise lounge by surrounding computer-designed matrices of waterjet cut stainless steel. Though her other sculptures frequently subvert the conception that manufactured objects may forever dominate our landscapes, these works explore an alternative possibility.”

you can also find out more about Celeste by going to her website www.celesteroberge.com and/or the above piece at the following link: http://www.onlinenevada.org/articles/cairn-sculpture-celeste-roberge