I have been photographing David Stahl’s sculptures for ten years, and for ten years I have had the same quiet frustration with my own pictures. A photograph of one of Dave’s pieces tells you what it looks like. It does not tell you what it is like to walk around one.
So this summer I tried something.
I took photographs I had already made in Dave’s studio, some of them going back years, and I built rooms around them. Rooms with skylights and tall windows and the kind of quiet floor a museum has, the sort of space these sculptures have deserved since the day they were made. Then I set Dave’s work inside them and looked at what happened.
What happened is that they got bigger. Not in size. In seriousness.
Look at that room for a minute. Four pieces made years apart, out of different piles of salvaged hardware, and they are holding a conversation with each other as though they were always meant to hang together. Dave has never had a room like that. He has had a studio, and a library lobby, and a JCC hallway, and the walls of the building he works in, and every one of those has been a gift. But he has never had this.
Now, at least, we can see it.
And then one you can pick up
The rooms were the first half of the experiment. This is the second.
This is a piece Dave built in 2013 out of nails and bolts and wire, painted blue. It is not a photograph. Drag it with your finger or your mouse and it turns, and you can look at the back of it, and the underside, and the places where the threads of the bolts catch the light.
Those threads are the whole artwork. That is the thing a photograph has never once managed to carry.
Go slowly with it. It takes a few seconds to arrive, because the entire sculpture has to travel to you before it can be turned. If you want to know how it was made, I wrote that down separately.
How these were made, plainly
I would rather say this than have it asked.
The rooms are not real. The photographs of Dave’s sculptures are real, and everything around them was made to give the work a setting worthy of it. The three dimensional piece is reconstructed from photographs, which means the sides my camera never saw have been interpreted rather than recorded. It is a faithful likeness of Dave’s sculpture. It is not a scan of it, and I will never call it one.
What is entirely and only Dave’s is the sculpture. Every one of these was built by hand, from hardware and castoffs and the small metal leftovers the rest of the world had already finished with. Nails, caps, gears, rings, wire, discs. Things thrown away, gathered up, and turned into something nobody can look away from.
That has always been the work. All I did was build it a room and take the glass off.
There is more of this coming. Thirty one more sculptures are lined up behind this first one, and I would like every one of them to end up somewhere you can turn it in your hands.
Thank you for looking. Come stand in front of the real ones when you can.
