The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum: Found Outside

Black Tide Tower

Found Outside, 2012
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
Ridgefield, Connecticut

From a distance, Jason Clay Lewis's sculpture Black Tide Tower brings to mind an isolated fragment of rusting industrial architecture: a refinery stack or a factory chimney. On closer inspection, the tower's rusted patterns congeal into groups of galloping knights on horseback and vignette-like scenes of interrogation and torture. Rising up the shaft of the tower, the figurative imagery brings to mind medieval or Renaissance engravings or woodcuts, boldly transformed by the artist into the medium of rust bleeding into the blackened surfaces of oil barrels.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Lewis has oil in his blood, growing up in Oklahoma. Long fascinated by historical fiction, particularly of the medieval period, the artist has frequently referenced both the art and history of the Middle Ages, drawing parallels between the past and present. The late medieval period was truly a distant mirror, filled with the calamity of famine, plague, war, and religious strife, evidenced by the age's apocalyptic leanings that strangely echo our present cultural landscape. But for an artist with an awareness of oil, the medieval period is inexorably connected to the present through one major historical event, the Crusades - starting Europe (and later America) on the road to Middle Eastern colonialism.

Black Tide Tower pointedly resembles Trajan's Column, a military monument in Rome erected by Emperor Trajan in 113 AD to commemorate his victories in the Dacian Wars. Trajan's column has served as a model for numerous war monuments, both ancient and modern. Yet it is another column that is equally relevant to Lewis's subject matter: Brancusi's Endless Column (1938). Like Endless Column, Lewis's sculpture is made of repeating modular forms that imply visual infinity. However, Black Tide Tower also suggests, through its materiality and imagery, an endless—and tragic—cycle of violence and retribution tied to the control of resources. - Richard Klein