cairn

source: onlinenevadaorg

Just outside the entrance to Reno’s Nevada Museum of Art stands Cairn, a kneeling man made of rocks. It was commissioned in 1998 as part of a major exhibition, From Exploration to Conservation: Picturing the Sierra Nevada.

The sculpture derives its name from the cairns of Europe, which date back at least to the Bronze Age. They were piles of stones used to mark a specific site – a burial, a road, a boundary. The museum’s Cairn was created by Celeste Roberge, who began making this type of work in the late 1980s. Like her more recent stacked rock sculptures that incorporate furniture, the cairns represent an exploration of geological time, or the perception of geological time, as it intersects with human time.

Roberge’s cairns are welded steel grid figures, roughly conforming to the shape of the artist’s own body – but over life sized. The rocks used for filling the sculptures come from the region in which the artworks will be sited. The steel grid and the rocks themselves offer a complex aesthetic, of a formal grid with an arbitrary jumble of the rocks behind it. That jumble includes an infinite variation of round and flat shapes, voids, and a wealth of different textures and colors. The cairns are, in the aggregate, massive and weighty, and seemingly unchanging, at least within our human time frame. Yet, with irony or humor, they help define a human form.

Beloved by visitors and members, Cairn quickly became an iconic artwork for the museum, and was thus relocated to its guardian’s position by the door when the museum opened its new building in 2003. It is interesting to watch people stop and detour over to examine the work, to see kids climb on it, and to watch frequent visitors give it a surreptitious little pat as they go past.
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source: artsufledu

Celeste Roberge is the Coordinator of the Sculpture Area and she teaches all levels of undergraduate and graduate sculpture. She is interested in sculptural concepts relating to the intersection of geological time and human time.

She writes about her work as follows: “A few summers ago, I saw a nineteenth century leather psychiatrist couch at Polly Peter’s Antique Shop in Portland, Maine. The weight and resonance of that couch obsessed me until I began the series Stacks. I was inspired by the absurd desire to embed antique sofas in thousands of pounds of dry-stacked stone in such a way that the furniture would seem like a fossil within a stone road-cut or like an archaic funerary monument extruded from the earth. Although we like to imagine that cultural artifacts, such as furniture and art, exist free of time and decay, the material conditions of the world inevitably recoup them.”

Her most recent solo exhibitions include “Stacks for Home and Office” at A.V.C. Contemporary Art in New York City; “Small Sculptures and Drawings” at June Fitzpatrick Gallery in Portland, Maine; “Quarry” at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine; and “Sitting Room” at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art in Largo, Florida. She was included in a group exhibition of six artists, one from each continent, commissioned to construct site-specific outdoor sculptures for the Off-Site Project, International Stone Sculptors at Expo 2000 in Germany. Her sculpture “Raum/Room” an outdoor living room constructed of sixteen tons of sandstone and antique furniture remains on long term loan to the Schaumburger Quarry in Steinbergen, Germany. Her most recent group exhibition was Home at the d.u.m.b.o. art center (dac) in Brooklyn, NY.

Roberge has received two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She was a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University in 1998-99. Her sculptures are included in the collections of the Nevada Museum of Art, Portland Museum of Art, Farnsworth Art Museum, Harn Museum of Art, Jackson Laboratories, Bar Harbor, Maine, Runnymede Sculpture Farm, Woodside, California, Emory University in Atlanta, and in private collections in Maine, Boston, New York, Miami, and Santa Barbara.