dave beck

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Reconciled (Pink)

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Reconciled Series
Cast Hydrocal, 2003

Children can appear fragile, dependent, and impressionable throughout their early years, while also having a grand capacity for adaptation and adjustment in nearly any situation.  If a child is forced into an unfamiliar environment, given some time, it will fill that space with its life, its energy, and its own self.  With this body of work, I have tried to mirror the capacity a child has for turning any situation into something full of interest and beauty by mere occupation.
I manipulated these very heavy liquid plaster pajama bodies in the preliminary stage of their development, having control over their position while placing them into a container that was quite often not fitting for a child to normally find itself.  The ballooned figure would fill as much of that space as gravity would allow it - often times resulting in an accurate representation of the negative space of the container used to created the figure.  While some of these figures might imply morbidity, it must be stressed that these images are only what one perceives them to be - a correlation constructed within each viewer's mind due to a significant event or image filed in one's memory.