If art was purely about attitude, you'd have to award Robert Hood a gold star. He recycles found materials (in this instance beer kegs, topo maps and a washing machine drum) with spirit and play. And the gag around what is art (explored here in possibly the world's grandest domestic brazier) is pushed to industrial extremes - via more than 100 kilograms of formed and welded mild steel.
Just who laughs last? It matters not perhaps, but the mettle of the Dadaist is certainly alive and well here. Serious with aesthetics and probing always around our interface with nature, Hood continually asks us to consider our relationship with materials and to what is around us, in his quirky, canny way.
JS
Press release courtesy Jonathan Smart Gallery.
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