Robin Mandel

My recent work concerns the pursuit of the ideal home.? I examine how spaces and things shape our understanding of home, and how sculpture can pry open that process and reveal its workings.? Home, in my work, is a locus of conflicting ideas ? the dream of order and stability that it offers, the inertia that accompanies it, and the nomadic urge that resists it.? The ideal is folly to pursue, but it entices nonetheless; I seek to articulate both the enticement and the folly.

Much of my recent work is kinetic; it explores how an object can perform for a viewer, and what the duration of this experience can mean.? I am interested in how objects in motion can come to embody aspects of our domestic yearnings, and how these desires address themselves to the viewer. By animating household objects, such as the wine glasses in the piece Dinner, I create stand-ins for characters in an archetypal domestic drama, and let their relationships play out through the kinetic mechanisms that drive them.