BY Sarah Archer | February 7, 2010

Albert Pfarr controls the universe...

 
...at least as far as his sculptures are concerned. Pfarr creates self-contained systems for his sculptures to inhabit, where building blocks can be combined to form expressive works in any number of ways, reflecting the systems that govern our natural world. Chaotic, yes - but there’s a method.
 
“Peg-in-hole assemblage allows me to insert hundreds of interchangeable elements into cylindrical ceramic cores”, he says. “In a sense, I’ve created a game for myself that is not unlike Legos. I enjoy working within the limitations of this invented game—seeing what new pieces can be made each time I set up the work using a vocabulary of shapes.” These building blocks that we can see and touch represent the microscopic ones that we can’t see: the particles and forces that give the universe its form and content, and direct our physical existence. Pfarr’s sculptures remind us that something, or someone, is ordering the way we experience the world and the unpredictable events that shape our lives and that of our home in the universe.
 
The sculptures can be taken apart and reassembled, meaning that their literal form is less important to their meaning than the system that governs the variety of forms that they can take on. Pfarr surrenders the delicate, “just so” quality of much ceramic sculpture in favor or a more dynamic and flexible construction technique that never yields exactly the same result twice. This unpredictability is the perfect metaphor for our tenuous grasp on the reins of our natural world – we try to control it in myriad ways, but we didn’t invent the rules for how it all fits together and we ourselves can, and will, be rearranged.