Specific Sites

This series of sculptures creates spaces that are precisely scaled to the human body. Incorporated into their making is improvisation as well careful, precise construction. They begin as carefully preserved spatial improvisations, then subjected to a far longer process of connecting, engineering and refining, that gives them the rigor of carefully calibrated, self-contained systems. These sculptures are also in dialogue with photography through their assertive attention to framing and vantage points, as well as to painting with careful attention to nuances of surface. Without overtly referencing or conjuring the body, they are sculptures about human presence and our consciousness of movement through space.

Black Jefferson Unions 1993-95 h. wood, steel, stainless steel, galvanized steel, brass, plexiglass

Index wood, steel, stainless steel, aluminum, plexiglas | h. 100 3/4” x w. 91 1/4” x d. 85”


 

Black Pool 1996-99 h. 31” x w. 96” x d. 228” wood, steel, iron, stainless steel, cement, plexiglas


Southern States 1990-95. h. 54” x w. 105” x d. 66” wood, steel, stainless steel, galvanized steel, bronze, aluminum, plexiglas



Black & Tan Fantasy 1993-95 h. 62” w. 204” x d. 150”. pine, redwood, stainless & galvanized steel, pigment



Homage to Atget 1992-93. h. 128 1/2” x w. 75 1/2 x d. 82”


South by South. 1992-95 h. 19 3/4” x w. 120 1/2” x d. 121” wood, steel

 
 
 
 

Untitled 2020

Color Codes 2020

From “An Inadvertent Vanguard” by Karen Wilkin — The Hudson Review, Volume IV Number 1 Spring 2002

William Noland’s recent sculptures are like recollections of inhabited places. For many year, he has worked with lumber cannibalized from sources ranging from derelict furniture to abandoned houses, employing a language of building and joining that echoes the previous history of his materials. Lately, he has added steel and plexiglas to his palette, at once strengthening the associations with building and enriching his range of colors and textures. Noland’s complex structures can seem improvised, cobbled together; narrow strips or fragile planes are ganged into dense masses that can seem temporary or casual. Fragmented “walls,” schematic “windows, “ collapsed “railings,” and blocked “entrances” make his sculptures seem domestic and vernacular, like disintegrating real outbuildings. But Noland’s four-square planar constructions soon begin to read not only as distillations of architecture, but also as reinventions of Cubist painting space in three dimensions. Although these ramshackle “places” are scaled to the human body, subtle distortions of expected proportions and placements further divorce them from the literal; “windowless” takes the place of “window,” “the possibility of passage” replaces “entrance.” The metaphorical replaces the specific, but overtones of human presence, both past and imminent, persist.