The Hideaway is a bas-relief - a complex, Romanesque technique that marries aspects of two-dimensional imagery with those of three-dimensional sculpture – in carved maple wood. A light wood, it is painted by the artist in black gesso and covered in graphite to give the finished work an appearance not dissimilar to Ghiberti's Baptistry doors in Florence. At bottom left the artist has portrayed his own home in Minnesota, at bottom right the Nebraska home and an imagined military hummer. All about them a canopy of trees crash with flailing roots, the victims, like perspective itself, of some terrible storm. A dark, baroque fiction roughly hewn with basic carpenter's tools, it presents a strange, unfamiliar, burnt scene of rural Armageddon.

Aaron Spangler

A Little Indian

2005
Carved and painted maple
30.5 x 17.8 x 20.3 cm

This small, free-standing sculpture portrays the ruins of a last frontier. Above the listless body of a robot, fallen in battle, the head of a native American sits impaled on a tree like a hunting trophy. A torrent of water, meanwhile, flows through the stationary remains of a carriage, the galloping spaceship of its time familiar to viewers of Western films. The addition of a modern flush-toilet, the housing around which appears to have been destroyed, confuses the scene further, leading the viewer to question the essence of the rural landscape. The uniform black coat applied to the work's surface serves to remove any hierarchy that might otherwise exist among the various objects that can be identified.