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Elspeth Pratt
Petits-Chevaux
Elspeth Pratt, Petits-Chevaux 1992
plywood, corrugated cardboard, strapping
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Elspeth Pratt
(b. 1953 Seattle, WA; lives in Vancouver, BC)
Petit-Chevaux 1992
plywood, corrugated cardboard, strapping
113 x 54 x 104 cm
Gift of the Canada Council Art Bank, 2002
Mount Saint Vincent University Collection
2002.15
In Vancouver, where she has lived for more than twenty years, Elspeth Pratt is known for her inventive use of building supplies and her interest in leisure as it correlates with the built environment. Her works borrow from 20th-century formal vocabularies associated with constructivist and post-minimalist sculpture.
Petits-Chevaux is a gambling game played at resorts and casinos on a board perforated with concentric circular slits in which revolve, each independently on its own axis, figures of jockeys on horseback. Pratt’s sculpture is loosely based on this mechanism: the rolled cardboard evokes the revolving action, while the precariousness of the assemblage corresponds to the risks of wagering on such a game. Two sides of the box meet at 45 degrees and at two at 135. The difficult-to-decipher shape — is it flat, a cube, or a parallelogram — suggests that appearances may be deceptive. Pratt cites in particular the fallacy that organized games of chance are free of the controls that regulate other social activities.
Most tellingly of all, Pratt’s unfinished home building materials and makeshift construction assert the poetry of bricolage against the ponderous spectacle of corporate real estate and its glittering, plaza plop accoutrements.
From Work Work Work, by I. Jenkner
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