Courtesy of Federico Uribe and Adelson Galleries
A sculpture of a white sheep looking curious.
'Sheep' is made from scissors, wool, zip ties, and large knitting needles.
The tagline for Colombian-born artist Federico Uribe’s website is I BUILD OBJECTS OUT OF OBJECTS, which gets to the heart of the matter, although it doesn’t convey the joy and inventiveness of his large, exuberant creations.
Uribe, whose solo show “Metamorphosis” opens at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art on Sept. 30, tends to collect a lot of “things” that become the raw materials of his work, like the panda bear made out of bullet shells that is the signature image of the MMoCA show.
“Nowadays people give me stuff,” Uribe tells Isthmus in a phone interview during which he is working, the sound of a staple gun providing a percussive soundtrack. “People will go to a show and then they’ll call me and say, ‘I have guitar strings, are you interested in them?’ There’s a tendency for people to think I can do anything with something else,” Uribe says, “and normally, I can.”
Bullet casings, a frequent material, he buys from a recycling center; pencils he buys wholesale. He scouts thrift stores. Someone just gave him 5,000 neckties, he reports. Is there anything he can’t use? Uribe confesses that golf balls are “really difficult. They’re hard, You can’t screw them, you can’t glue them. I like them but I had to give up.” He has a lot of light bulbs that he has no plan for yet. “I try to build beauty out of these objects,” he says.
Sometimes he gets the idea and looks for the materials; sometimes vice versa. He often works with what he calls “flexible lines,” shoestrings, wire, neckties, “and I essentially paint with these materials. That’s the way I read it.” He sees the color and form of objects, rather than their function. But the object’s intended use can play a role in the idea of the piece, as puns or double entendres.
Uribe’s immersive installations like his coral reef, which will be on display at MMoCA, can take eight months to build. He made that all on his own, but does have assistants to help with the construction of some objects. The Miami-based artist says he doesn’t particularly like leaving his studio: “I’m obsessed, I work 12 hours a day, six days a week.”
Guest curator Laura Dickstein Thompson, who previously curated an exhibit of Uribe's work for Mass MOCA on optimism, says that “transforming the way we understand something is an important piece of Federico’s work.” The coral reef, made out of plastic, carries a dark reminder of the plastics littering the ocean, and overall his use of discarded materials is a reminder of the mounting environmental impact of human consumption — take, for instance, his globe made out of baby bottle nipples. Even so, she reminds the viewer to see “the whimsy behind his work.”
“There is beauty out there,” Uribe says, and he is on an “obsessive quest” for it. “I try to find it everywhere I go and everywhere I see it. My moral destiny is to create things that make people smile.”
