Kavi Gupta | 835 W. Washington Blvd. Floor 1
Kavi Gupta presents a solo exhibition surveying the career of acclaimed artist and perceptual engineer Willie Cole.
Cole’s aesthetic position has long been associated with upcycling: the creative reuse of materials that might otherwise be destined for the junkyard. He has made artworks out of old clothes irons, vintage shoes, plastic water bottles, and, most recently, musical instruments.
But there is much more to Cole’s art than implied by a perfunctory analysis of his materials. Unlike so many other objets trouvés artists of the present and the past, whose ideas relate more to simple accumulation, combination, or anti-art sentiment, Cole’s work possesses an underlying humanity that shows he is part of something more profound than aesthetic, or even ecological, trends.
