A handled wheel begs to be turned. A pulley waits to be tugged. Placards on the wall encourage, almost demand, interaction. In Danny Saathoff’s world there are no do not touch signs. In Danny Saathoff’s world, there’s just the opposite.
Art and Play
Returning to for his third show in as many years, Saathoff tears down the barrier between viewer and artwork and asks his guests to play instead.
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First a jewelry artist, Saathoff intentionally brings the same kind of physical interaction inherent in wearable art to his sculptural, mixed media wall pieces.
“It grew out of jewelry and jewelry is interactive–you’re playing with it, you’re wearing it, you’re touching it,” Saathoff said. “I didn’t want the artwork to just be this thing you couldn’t touch.”
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Not only can you touch the work, but you must. To get the full experience of the majority of the pieces in the show, you have to turn a wheel or tug on a pulley or in some other way break down the invisible gallery barrier.
Select pieces in Saathoff’s show demand not physical interaction but something else: time. These pieces have elements that move slowly, imperceptibly if you pass by them too quickly, and are run by clock motors.
“Life has gotten so fast, I like to bring it back a notch, take it down, make people have to interact,” Saathoff said. “Even if it’s just by standing there, they have to interact with it to see what it’s going to do.”
The movements are subtle and yet surprising because there’s movement at all. It’s a design that catches the viewer off guard and begs a pause.
“In some ways I’m taking a snippet in time and stretching that time, making it longer, trying to get people to stop and see what might happen in that little designated moment of time,” Saathoff said.
From Jewelry to Sculpture and Back Again
Saathoff’s jewelry, it should be said, is not for the meek. The wearable art on display in the center of the gallery is as bold and intriguing as the sculptural pieces surrounding it. One ring looks like a dagger, two more have a ball that slides back and forth along a rail with each slight tilt of a finger.
“It’s elevating jewelry to a point where it really is small scale sculpture,” Saathoff said.
Fitting for small sculptures, then, is the fact that Saathoff presents each jewelry piece on its own custom pedestal.
“They’ve got their own presence and their own presentation,” he said.
Looking at Saathoff’s work as a whole, the natural assumption might be that the jewelry pieces are smaller pieces inspired by and modeled after his larger work. In fact, it’s the other way around. Saathoff studied jewelry making in college and his mixed media sculptures came later, in the last decade, a natural result of experimentation with wearable pieces.
“You can only make jewelry so big until it’s really just sculpture,” Saathoff said.
As he allowed himself to create more wall hangings and suspended mixed media pieces, Saathoff said his work started to get “bigger and bigger and bigger, and now it’s as big as it wants to be, as big as it needs to be.”
While it is true that the sculpture grew out of the jewelry, it’s also true that some of the jewelry emulates specific sculpture pieces in different mediums. Fabric kites in a sculpture become titanium plates in jewelry; similarly, the kinetic energy of Saathoff’s work is mirrored on the large and small scale.
Visit Gallery 360 to interact with the art yourself. Saathoff’s show runs through January 8.
