INVITING FOOTWEAR Duncan Hewitt's carved skates. CREDIT LUC DEMERS |
"The Smallest Eight I Can Skate," Duncan Hewitt's interactive imagining of the Coleman Burke Gallery in Brunswick's Fort Andross, is as elegant and introspective as its diminutive title. Known for his hand-carved recreations of everyday objects that simultaneously ask us to consider our discernment of value and the value of sentiment, Hewitt adds motion and performance to the mix in his transformation of the gallery into an ice rink.
At first glance the expansive space at Coleman Burke seems underused. Five wooden carts are arbitrarily strewn around the room serving as platforms for arrangements of wooden ice skates, hand-carved and -painted. The discovery of signs encouraging visitors to gently push the carts around the room explains the vacancy. Pushing the heavy industrial carts invites the viewer into the work, both in the effect on the composition of the space and in the ability to visualize a rink once movement begins. The room wakes up: Suddenly the cart being pushed is the chair you brought onto the pond for support the first time you donned skates, and the scratches on the gallery floor become scars from other skaters playing hockey.
In its temporary configuration, the five carts were almost equidistant from one another, forming a ring inside the space, and an intuitive path to take while observing the work. The arrangement of life-sized skates on each cart conjures a specific scenario. One depicts a busy rink, while another captures the line-up before a race, with two contestants waiting for the whistle.
Each pair of skates has personality, evoking the individual who would be wearing them; tongues flap flirtatiously, or laces are tied tightly. Though they are crafted familiarly, accentuating their specific wear and tear, the carvings are crude and the paint jobs hasty.
While the first three carts encountered in the space playfully represent the progress of an amateur skater, the farthest two recall the title of the show, with voyeuristic depictions of the obsessive endeavor to skate the "smallest eight" possible. The first of these carts shows two skates confidently maneuvering an eight about twice their size. The size of the "eight" is illustrated by two holes carved directly from the cart, making the interiors of the eights a sculptural and tangible indicator of growth, or reminder of stagnation. The cart deepest in the room displays two adult-sized skates botching a much smaller eight, with one skate at an angle so unnatural it is easy to imagine the wearer's pained utterance. The sculptures sit precariously close to the edge of these carts, reminding the viewer of the value of the objects being pushed around, and to be as careful and meditative with the carts as the skaters are in skating the smallest eight.
The show pivots around these two scenes, which stray from the communal aspect of a skating rink to the personal and cathartic aspects of progress, accomplishment, and repetition. Hewitt's eight is also infinity, and the notion of skating the smallest eight suggests the desire to minimize the weight of infinity, or perhaps to become part of it, decreasing the discrepancy between centripetal and centrifugal.
