Blart

What It Is: Ida y Vuelta (Round Trip) (2008, wood and
paint, 42 by 42 by 24 inches, by Matt Sellars)

Where It Is: Platform Gallery

Shipping containers come and go forever. Seattle artist Matt Sellars
turns their action into a rickety coliseum of consumption: He seals up
the containers (little wooden blocks he makes and paints in bright
colors) and strips them of their identifying lettering. With them he
builds a miniature monument to their eternal round trip—out and
back, or Ida y Vuelta, as the work’s multinational title
says—charged with centripetal force. That force implies smooth
repetitive movement but the sculpture’s thousand jagged surfaces belie
how simple, rational, and equal each component part is. In the center
there’s space for something, but what it might be is hard to say.
Gladiatorial blood sport? Refugees from a natural disaster? (The
Katrina association, which I doubt the artist intended, comes to mind
through the double architectures of that event: the Superdome and the
boxy FEMA trailers, each mirrored here.) The sculpture fixes in the
imagination but doesn’t resolve. Its meaning stays in play just as its
form remains vulnerable to a toddler’s fist.