Shadow Still Life, 2008.
Ceramic, Steel, 61" x 43" x 7"

Presence Through Absence:
A conversation with Wade Kramm
by Elizabeth Astor

EA: In your studio, sitting on a steel table are five abstracted ceramic objects, three pears, an apple, and a bottle… a still life. Could you talk about how this work came about and what was the process?

WK: The still life has interested me for years as a way to explore some of my sculptural ideas. Much of still life painting was concerned with the effects of light on the objects and emphasized the transitory nature of life. In my approach to the still life, it is still concerned with light, time, and the transitory, but instead of using rotting fruit, a skull, or an hourglass, I am focusing on the shadow of an object. The process I go through to make the forms is one that you do not see in the finished work and yet, it is very important to me. In this case I first traced the elongated shadows from a group of pears on to paper. It is critical to me that there was an original object that is now absent. Then with clay, I attempted to re-substantiate these silhouettes into three dimensional forms…adding mass to the shadows. I then placed these forms in a row on a table so they then take the place of the original pears. I suppose, they are now a combination of object and shadow.

EA: At first glance, these forms are very strange and do not resemble pears so much as blob-like forms.

WK: I think what attracted my attention while I making this work was when I started placing the pears on their sides which caused the shadow to become very stretched and distorted. Once I made it three dimensional with the clay, I became very fascinated by how it

takes a little bit of work for your eyes--or mind--to adjust. I think it has something to do with trying to perceive what appears to be a flat shadow form, three dimensionally. When you first look at the objects sitting there on the table, they seem like five blobby objects. It is only when you attempt to look at them two dimensionally that you are able to see them as a stretched pear or apple, but looking at them this way is going against your eyes training. I find that I can only look at them for a few moments before they suddenly go back to being blobby objects. Although it is frustrating to try to view for very long, it is this unstableness, and how it seems to travel between two and three dimensions, that I find interesting.

EA: You seem to like making art that we, as viewers, have to work at a little bit. The work seems a bit elusive at first glance.

WK: That is true. I'm not sure when this started and I do not set out on a new work with being elusive in mind. What I like about it is that it leads to a different kind of relationship with the work. The experience is not one of intellectually contemplating what an artist is trying to express. It demands a different kind of experience, of letting it work inside of you and perhaps even walking away with something of this experience.

EA: Many of your works, such as the shadow photographs, the spinning chairs, and the two recent self portrait works all involve shadows. What does the shadow represent or mean to you?

WK: Over the years, it has functioned in different ways for me, but though out all of my shadow work I am interested in the relationship of objects to their shadows and of ways of separating this unity. Objects and their shadows are fused together despite the shadows lack of substance. In some of the earlier shadow work, I was cutting apart things (mostly chairs) and making miniatures made from the material. What I wanted to explore with this work was the possibility of transferring a shadow of one object to another, from the full size to the miniature. Can the unique relationship between an object and shadow be transferred into a separate object if the materials are used from the original? I made several works with this idea, the culmination being the work titled 'Collapsible Chair' in which the original was no longer present yet its shadow was projected onto the wall. In the last couple of years I began to use the shadow again, but without the materials of the original. I have been more interested in the elongations and distortions of shadows in relationship to the original. The more recent work begins to separate the relationship between object and shadow, between cause and effect. In both the Janus Head and the Self Portrait there is a definite break, a disconnectedness between the object and the resulting shadow.

Elizabeth Astor is a writer and art critic. She is a frequent art contributor to several magazines and journals, including City Views, New Dimensions and she recently curated 'Transparent Objects'. This is an excerpt of an interview that took place on June 26, 2007.