April 2000
Howard Skrill
These works are inspired by the dynamic carving-up of the natural landscape that has occurred during the haphazard development of sites of industrial production. The girders, wires, bridges, utility houses and stagnant pools of water and other ‘scars’ upon the landscape achieve a certain gritty poetic resonance in these works, belying their innate ‘ugliness.’
The works are not paeans to lost paradises that industrialization and development have extinguished. They explore the visual fact of the alterations. If the architecture of man’s structures are a surrogate for his (or her) body, then the girders that man plunges into the earth and the wires he strings across the sky can be viewed as surrogates for the men, themselves, who rigged those girders and strung those cables and all the aspirations, hopes and disillusionment that these men vested in those forms.
Can man’s forms stand as man himself? Are the light poles and bridges, our bodies struggling in the world against life’s vagaries? If these forms can be a substitute for our bodies, then how about our history? Certainly a survey of history would mostly be an accounting of the forms that man has erected for his use and that stand as symbols for himself. These forms also resemble life, itself. Electric towers are mankind’s Frankensteins, towering way above us, surging towards the sky, defying the sky to bring them to heal. Telephone poles are a gentler breed: vulnerable in poured cement casings, arms and legs jutting forth like children’s stick figures. Roads tear the earth like scars. Acreages transform it into a tapestry. These alterations command us to turn left when we desire to walk forward, exclude us from egress, cause us to watch out footfalls and board machines that make us travel way too fast.
Howard Skrill is an artist residing with his wife, also an artist, and two children in Brooklyn, NY. He is currently studying towards a MFA at the City University of New York, Queens College.
These works are acrylic on canvas and utilize tape and rice paper collage.
