Sculpture Source

Detail of "Grieving," by Jerry Ross Barrish

We participate in consumption – the satisfaction of wants resulting chiefly in destruction, deterioration, or transformation.  The objects we create experience consumption – the progressive wasting away of the body. It is an efficiently detached relationship.  Whatever emotional connection, if any, to our belongings we have, eventually they lose their hold on our attention and we consign them to landfills or the depths of the sea.  We have little time for empathy when ephemerality is the standard.  But some of these castaways are resilient.  They push against our enmity.  They resurface or wash ashore.

This is when Jerry Ross Barrish finds them and breaths life into the inanimate. This is not creation ex nihilo but creation ex vetus adveho novus – out of the old comes the new.  They combine and reconstitute into more than the sum of their plastic parts while still maintaining the markings and scars of their former life.  Bent, distorted industrial drainage tubes, series 73681-82000, become a subtle set of controposto hips and legs.  “Made in Mexico” containers transform into a hunched torso. The curve of a misused snorkel creates a cradling arm and hand.  A cratered and scuffed toy ball marked “Supper Tuff” is a makeshift, downcast, mournful head.  Refuse - discarded, unwanted, isolated – reconstitutes itself through anthropomorphic redemption.  But this is not all.  Barrish has one more act of transformation and transcendence.  As if in defiance for the once consumed, he has cast several of these assembled detritus into bronze.  Ephemerality is now corporealized.  Ironically, decay is permanently preserved. Long after the consumers themselves have passed away through consumption, those who were once the objects of consumption will live on.

Through this multi-layered transformation, Barrish requires a reconsideration of human empathy.  His objects of castaway materials take on the form and likeness of those who have discarded them.  But they are more than human in form.  They are also human in substance.  Feeling. Emotive. Empathetic.  Despite their lowly genesis, they have transcended their own fleeting material by communicating the very thing that was originally denied them.  They have the last laugh.  Yet, these do not seem to have the disposition of vengeful irony.  They remember their humble history.  They do not gloat.  They look back on us and give in the face of thoughtless waste.  They were treated apathetically yet they reveal what can be of highest nobility - emotion. Joy. Sorrow. Play. Contemplation. The desirable attributes of the consumer have been mastered by the consumed.  Roles have reversed.