Review

"Industrialize", Steel.

Tyler Dawson
Industrialize

12 a.m.-11:59 p.m.

Art in R Park
Roe Blvd at 54th St.
Roeland Park, KS

Hours: 24 hours
Runs through: Sept. 30

Art in R Park site: http://www.roelandpark.net/art-in-r-park.html

Had Tyler Dawson installed Industrialize over the winter session of Art in R Park, some people might still be looking for it.  As it is, he did a more than creditable job of hiding the sculpture in plain sight.

A lot of people will drive by -- repeatedly -- and never see it. Others might wonder why the Parks and Recreation Department would leave a dead tree in the median of Roe Boulevard (and why the live trees don't have mulch around their bases).

Yes. It's that realistic. The 17-foot steel sculpture  is ... well, you can see the picture atop this post. There's no hint of stylization, no forced symmetry. It's almost as though Dawson dipped a real tree into molten steel, rather than crafting Industrialize from the ground up. Only a close examination, which requires a foot crossing to the median, reveals the welds where branches meet trunk.

 Dawson, a student at Kansas City Art Institute, says there are no statements implicit in the design or placement of the piece -- although he does stress that It's not supposed to be phallic.

Here's an excerpt from his statement for this show, written in third person:

Tyler believes that anything that needs words to push it along can’t stand on its own artistic merit. However, he believes that none of his things HAVE any artistic merit. They’re just fun and that’s what he does. ... He still believes he is not an artist.

With all due respect, it's not entirely Dawson's call. True, this piece is artless -- in the sense that there's nothing contrived about it -- but it's as much a work of art as any other faithful rendition of the natural world.

And despite its hard, cold lifelessness, this is a fun piece. It's the botanical equivalent of Duane Hanson's statues (two of which can be seen here in Kansas City, one at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the other at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art).

There's a wry chuckle that comes with being taken in by an ultra-realistic piece. That's often followed by a different sort of laugh -- a You fell for it, too snicker -- when you get to see someone else doing the mandatory doubletake.

Industrialize should provide plenty of those moments over its five-and-a-half-month run -- provided people slow down long enough to get the joke, that is.

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