Lost and Sick, 1996

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‘Lost & Sick’ by Tony Matelli presents a tableau in which three young Boy Scouts have gone missing and are physically distressed. Their vomiting is an outward sign of an otherwise unseen inner disturbance. What has happened here? How have they become separated from the rest of the troop?
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‘I was trying to make a work that was emphatically about rejection. I wanted to depict a complete rejection of community. I wanted to make an anti-social sculpture. The sculpture depicts boys who are learning about civic and familial responsibility, adulthood. But it is also a depiction of failure. They are on the proving grounds of adulthood and are failing their first test.’ – Tony Matelli
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Exhibition history:
San Diego, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Small World: Dioramas in Contemporary Art, January 23 – April 30, 2000
Illustrated p. 34 and on the cover
San Francisco, Yerba Buena Center for the Visual Arts, To Be Real, 1997, n. p. (illustrated)