Surface Relations

This series of sculptures from the 1980s originated with sculptures that used the wall as the support surface. The series soon became more far more three-dimensional as the pieces eventually used the wall and the floor for support, allowing for aggressive incursions into space that brought attention to a full 180° experience, emphasizing side and three-quarter views. In the process, the pieces more consciously incorporated the surrounding architectural space and setting, seeking to engage with a viewer’s likely movement through space, over time. The series continued into the 1990s as free-standing pieces that deployed planar surfaces within a given sculpture that functioned, in effect, as wall or floor even as such sculptures required a fully 360° exploration.

Aquiline 1982-83 h. 80 1/2” x w. 39” x d. 88” aluminum, wall to floor

 

Akimbo 1983-84 h. 60 1/2” x w. 41” x d. 59 1/4” aluminum, wall-to-floor

Bull Durham 1986 h. 74” x w.23” x d. 52 1/2” stained wood

Jim & Jesse 1987 h. 90” x w. 51 3/4” x d. 38” wood

Filles de Kilimanjaro 1985. h. 116” x w. 22” x d. 44 1/2” wood

Monday Through Friday 19

Avenue to Orange 1988 h. 51 3/4” x w.54” x d. 55 1/2” wood, steel, stainless steel

Let’s Call This

The Traveler’s Palm 1989. h. 48 1/2” w. 37” x d. 43” wood, steel, stainless steel, paint

The Train, The Owls 1987-88 h. 28” x w.30” x d.53 1/2” Wood

Nuns Dancing 1989 h. 29” x w. 60” x d. 81” wood, steel, stainless steel, bronze

The Most Reverend 1991-92 h. 73 3/4” x w. 61 3/4” x d. 9 5/8” wood, steel, plexiglas,

Sunday Best 1980 h. 56 1/2” x w. 72” x d. 27” painted steel

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.