Whirl With Merle

Virginia Overton's Exhibition at Socrates Sculpture Park  

Socrates Sculpture Park is delighted to present Built, a parkwide solo exhibition of newly commissioned works by Virginia Overton that refashion found materials with dynamism and potency. In succinct, elegant forms, often accompanied with wry humor, Overton addresses concepts of labor, economics, and the land in today’s society. Her material choices–fundamental elements for construction and fabrication–combined with her axiomatic approach to process, evoke narratives of self-reliance, creative constraints, and expediency. At the Park, Overton creates new iterations of ongoing series of works – an altered pickup truck, a water feature, a roof truss gem sculpture, a suspended work, and a billboard, among others.

The show’s largest piece is a crystal-shaped sculpture made of industrial architectural truss systems and angle iron spanning 40 feet. Overton’s structure combines two truss types creating a series of pitched trusses by joining parallel Warren truss members. These amalgamated trusses ring the central axis of the crystal structure, producing a muscular polygon of steel beams and porous facets that cantilevers over the ground.

Additionally, Overton transforms a 1990 Ford F250 pickup truck with a reflective glass bead surface, exploring the pickup as a tool, a vessel, a symbol of a mobility and ambition, and as a sculptural material. Considering the forces of gravity, momentum, and inertia, the show also presents an industrial pine joist suspended from the Socrates artist studio’s homemade gantry. A water feature made from elements

Curator Jess Wilcox will also speak with us.