Amy Hauft, chair of the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media, spoke at the Anderson Gallery last night. She lectured in the same room that her exhibition was in, which was called Counter Re-formation.
After earning her B.A. from the University of California Santa Cruz, she attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture on scholarship, and later earned her MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago. Hauft has exhibited her large-scale architectural installations in galleries all over the world, including the Brooklyn Museum, the New Museum, the International Artists Museum (Poland), The American Academy in Rome, Wesleyan University Gallery, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Galleryaaa, and USC Atelier Gallery. She has been awarded residencies that have allowed her to work in different parts of the world including Umbria, Italy and Poland.
Amy Hauft, Counter Re-formation, 2009, 32 ft x 27 ft x 35 in; Plywood, canvas, sugar, ABS plastic, polystyrene foam, plaster, epoxy, paint
Amy Hauft, Counter Re-formation, 2009 (detail shot)
Amy Hauft’s installation uses sculpted sugar, art-historical references, metaphor, and shifts in scale to create a variety of experiences for her viewers. She replicated (in both scale and structure) an 18th century Louis XIV banquet table, originally intended for 100 guests. The ornate contours of the table are meant to have the viewer wander with its shape, and in one corner there’s an immaculate spiral of circles radiating from a central vortex. The table is covered with white cloth.
Hauft discussed with us her trip to Europe, where she studied casting and sculpting sugar under culinary historian Ivan Day. There, they leafed through cookbooks from the 17th century, and that this was when she found an etching of the table she decided to recreate. This was during the Baroque era in Europe, when artists were making sugar sculptures to mimic porcelain – a time before the art of porcelain was perfected. She also discovered a series of miniature staircases that French woodworking craftsmen had made. She combined pretty much all of these things.
On the Louis XIV table, there were small sculpted, painted hills of Styrofoam (which…isn’t sugar, like she had first said) with glitter sprinkled over. She said that these forms are intended to look like multiple things – snow drifts, icebergs, mountain ranges, sand dunes, etc. There scale is meant to shift on how you perceive them. In the center laid a medium sized sugar-sculpted staircase Hauft had created.
Amy Hauft finished up the lecture by saying that the intention of her work is to try to remake a physical experience she has had outdoors, even if it is impossible to create a landscape indoors.
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