ASHER DAVID KELMAN

Sculpture Garden
The Puff of Wind
30 Ft high sculpture of a gaff-rigged sailboat, moving in the wind, riding waves on beautiful waves, inspired by the curls on Venus in the painting, “The Birth of Venus” by Botticelli.
Such sail boats are a tradition on the Atlantic Coast in Maine and Massachussetts, where even teenagers can sail out on the ocean. In event of very rough winds, just one rope releases the single gaff-rigged sail and the boat is now able to ride out the raging storm.
The Conversation
The Conversation
When two people meet, we trade ideas in a conversation. Perhaps one person needs something or wants to make a proposal. How does such a that transaction proceed.
Here, the artist presents a conversation: a man making a proposal to a woman he likes. Each person expresses, as least in part, what they really want to achieve, but presents that in the post attractive way. The person listening has to hear out the other person but also to try to determine what’s left unsaid.
So a conversation is actually a struggle. Here, one person, might have power and resources and the other, for example, beauty and self-worth. The latter has to be acknowledged, accommodated, nurtured not merely bought! The male might boast his resources, ideas, dreams, wishes, wants and accomplishments. The woman, hanging on his every word looks for nuances that reveal a character capable of commitment and irrevocable sharing. The conversation is not what’s said, but what is expressed and discovered despite that actual meanings of the particular words
The one parson might be looking for immediate advantage. The other may want longer term commitment.
Out of a good conversation, each person, in the end should know the other’s full intent and reliability. Out of that comes the possibility of agreements that outlasts todays transient needs.
In this work, sensuously curved stainless steel tubes form both a man and a woman. The former has a flamboyant main of hair made of a spiral of blue glass. The woman has a receptive open arc of curved steel with yellow glass ovals representing her supply of eggs to be fertilized. That’s what women uniquely posses, a reproductive system that invests all its energy on one pregnancy at a time with high risk to herself. The male, by contrast, is free to move off and thats why understanding true long term intent is so much more important for the biological woman than the interested male seeking to bond with her.