MAKES:
Custom-built cages for gourds to grow within. And Airbnb installations.
EVOKES:
The tension between action and sculpture, between time and the body.
WANTS:
To drive a Zamboni.
Rob Rhee was a college freshman in need of a work-study job, and his first choice, driving a Zamboni on the campus ice rink, was reserved for hockey players.
He was not a hockey player, he was an aspiring writer, and they let aspiring writers monitor the wood and metal shop. So that’s where “I fell ass-backward into the best graduate school in sculpture in the country,” he still marvels, when a teacher who turned out to be the celebrated sculptor Jessica Stockholder, then head of the sculpture department at Yale, told Rhee that he could sit in on the weekly critiques—”if you want, since you’re always here messing around,” as he remembers.
“In my work, everything happens in the touch,” said the 34-year-old native New Yorker who now teaches at Cornish College of the Arts and lives in Seattle.
Take for instance Rhee’s series Occupations of Uninhabited Space, ongoing since 2013. First, he custom-builds cages that he ships to amenable gourd farmers he’s found in rural Washington.
