Peter Millett – cake boss, sculptor, imaginary architect

From a physical understanding of volume, Peter Millett built a cake.

His triangles join, like cupped hands, to make a bowl.

FEAST BOWL, 2009
Painted wood
25 x 21 x 8 inches
$7,500

He moves back and forth between wood and steel, from carving into a solid to manipulating the empty skin of metal. In metal he can extend and twist a triangle. When triangles try to become a square, they fail, just as, in Millett’s mind, the American effort to remake Iraq in its image will fail.

OPEN SQUARE, 2009
Welded steel
38 x 40 x 6 inches

He makes no models or drawings for his sculpture, preferring to work directly with what he calls the “real stuff.” While real stuff is in his hands, real stuff is in his head. His current exhibit at Greg Kucera Gallery, titled Skyscrapers, is a tribute to architects who blur the line between sculpture and buildings, making art that people inhabit high in the sky.  With a tough elegance that compromises on nothing, his sculptures and
drawings collaborate to create a weathered sense of place.
Lisa Corrin called his
work “disembodied architecture,” and that’s certainly part of it.

In HOTSEAT  (2010
Welded steel
60 x 22 x 12 inches), his imaginary architecture becomes an emblem of mourning. The moire-pattern of its skin function as windows, something like the Bridge of Sighs but more what prisoners in their Guantánamo Bay holding cells might see through chain-link. The few accused with evidence of substantial crimes mingle with those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and those who are guilty of thought crimes.

Decades ago, traveling in Iran, Millett was struck with the spare
beauty of the cities, how homes and mosques had almost no furniture, and
how light streaming through windows was filtered by latticework grills,
giving the emptiness inside a patterned sense of form. 
An affinity for Middle Eastern architecture and decor is fundamental to
his work. It’s hardwired into what he does. He’s not as much influenced
as drawn to admire.

That admiration is the subtext of his modernist
form. Following Brancusi and Noguchi, his work is more elemental than
minimalist, rooted not just in nature but in human
nature. Millett has his rich color sense largely in check, giving free rein
only to rust. The range of his rust tonalities is a marvel, from cold
and dark to dappled across a fluid expanse and warm in places as
oven-baked bread.

Through August 14.