Coleen Sterritt
[4][1][5] Sculpture critic Kay Whitney suggests Sterritt's work "expands and reinterprets three of the most important artistic inventions of the 20th Century—collage, abstraction and the readymade"— in play with the traditions of Arte Povera bricolage and Surrealist psychological displacement.
Her early influences were her grandmother, Dorothy Button, a well-known local gardener and her uncle, James A. Sterritt, a sculptor and educator, who co-founded the 1960s casting conferences at the University of Kansas that later became the International Sculpture Center.
[8] As a woman sculptor whose work ran counter to the era's dominant, almost exclusively male, Minimalist aesthetic, Sterritt embraced the openness of the Los Angeles scene, which was less burdened by male-dominated history and mainstream orthodoxies, exhibiting at museums, non-profit spaces, and the prominent Ulrike Kantor Gallery.
[15] Writers have characterized her art as a search for harmony between opposed formal, physical and psychological properties: organic and geometric, contained and expressive, natural and human-made, stable and unstable, rugged and delicate, independent and interdependent.
[3][25][15] While her work is nonrepresentational and grounded in formal issues of line, plane, shape, space and form, she subverts that with an improvisational mingling of found, fabricated and natural materials gleaned from studio detritus, recycling bins, and construction dumpsters that smuggle in diverse references and elusive narratives and metaphors.
[37][38] Several writers trace that ambiguity to seemingly incompatible impulses: a "strangely primal, poetic urge"[16] to infuse her economical formal language with the energy of totemic ritual and mystery, a contemporary, punk-like angst, and an eccentric, postmodern humor.
[8][1] She also undertook greater compositional challenges and expression of movement, that critic Colin Gardner wrote "synthesized classical balance with rugged, idiosyncratic kinesis,"[39] such as Full Quintet (1985),[34] Endear (1987), or Pike: For Earl the Pearl[40] (1988).
[41][32] Others recognized greater psychological tenderness and a "quasi-humorous pathos" in her ungainly, "lovable ugly ducklings,"[41] such as the swan-like Flush (1991), which features two forms in relation to explore issues of sexuality and desire, including separation and union, embrace and entrapment.
[21][4] Critics suggest the change in methods both expanded her use of space and imparted a new sense of temporality and fragility in the work (e.g., My Original Face, In Two Piles, Now Hanging[43] and Red Stack (Heartbeat)[44] (both 1995), and later, SqueezeBox,[45] a colorful, necklace-like construction from 2002).
[3][4] Sterritt began incorporating found furniture and recognizable objects in her work in the 2000s, subverting the "form follows function" dictum in witty, "towering agglomerations" that suggested plants, animals or hybrids (e.g., Daddy-O,[46] 2006).
[1][26][6][15] In recent years, critics have distinguished Sterritt from assemblage artists considered to have a "grunge" aesthetic (e.g., Nancy Rubin or Isa Genzken), noting her increasingly harmonious, poetic, and humorous refinement and a mastery of materials giving her sculpture "the vivacity of an intimate doodle," despite its command of space.
