Scott Fife has been creating artwork from cardboard for many years and has mastered the manipulation of this medium. I am fascinated at the lifelike features of these pieces created with such a blunt and basic material.
I like the physical nature of building the sculpture–it seems very old-fashioned and traditional. The idea of the material itself–it’s friendly, flexible, there’s a glow from in it. I’m the full-service artist–doing it all at the moment. I like the aspect of the low-tech tools that I need to make something like this. In the beginning [it was] an X-acto knife, masking tape and glue–now it’s the screw gun. So that hasn’t changed much at all–the directness of it, that I could begin to shape this, I can make this very plastic without any special process. There is that sense of one person building this thing–it becomes a “feat”–the whole thing isn’t about that but within the world we live in right now, it makes it a kind of tribal ritual piece; the fact that it was done by the human hand. [That] takes people back to the place in their life where they remember pasting things together [and so] understanding the process.
-Scott Fife
Elvis (Large) - archival cardboard, glue, screws, paint - 42 x 24 x 30 inches
Ed Keinholz (major) - 38 x 30 x 28 inches, archival cardboard, glue, screws and pigment
Grizzly Bear Blue - archival cardboard, glue, screws, 27 x 35 x 48 inches
Abe Lincoln - Archival cardboard, glue, screws and pigment 21 x 16 x 19 inches
I chose to feature Fife’s sculpture in this post, but he also has some mean drawing and painting skills. This is only a small sampling so make sure you checkout his work at the Platform Gallery website.
