ENDLESS PARKING CONE COLUMN

Endless Parking Cone Column, 9 BESEA 28” inch orange PVC traffic cones, black base, and steel, 2023.

Jefferson Nelson

Endless Parking Cone Column, is a look at Constantin Brâncusi’s Endless Column, as seen through a contemporary lens. Here the column is manifested in the seemingly infinite appropriated mass produced objects that seem to forever be directing us or slowing us down. Instead of the finely tuned zen inspiring bronze of Brâncusi’s column the viewer is confronted with the never ending construction cycle, of attention grabbing warning signs, and the absurdity of modern life, but also asked to reconsider and find beauty in these everyday objects and their odd new juxtaposition. Where Brâncusi’s column suggests infinite growth and development as it reaches for the sky, the parking cones suggest a pause: to slow down, or to change direction. I engage the viewer with a “hook”, a color, a form, a reflection, a familiar object that captures their attention. Through the accumulation of my images, the viewer will be engaged at a distant and venture closer for inspection. I hope that they consider the meaning of my image later with only their recalled experience of it.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Jefferson Nelson: Compulsion is the best way to describe my practice as an artist. My earliest memories of drawing were an instinctual motion of my mind through my hands. I suppose at different times in my life, I have attempted to use words to express my thoughts and feelings, but it became clear to me that my truest voice is visual. A realization that makes sense considering I could draw before I could write. As I pursued an education in visual art, each skill I learned led to another and another, expanding my ability to express myself, each articulation having its own attributes and failings. In many ways I was and continue to be enamored by the learning of these processes. As a young artist I found ceramics and working in three dimensions as my preferred method of expressing myself. However, I became disenfranchised with ceramics limitations and its fragility, and so my quest for knowledge led me into metal fabrication, wood carving, and eventually to the found object. It was through this process of discovery that I eliminated the abstract or the non objective as a means of expression and instead turned to the found or appropriated object. More recently ceramics has found its way back to me, or rather I have found my way back to ceramics. The beauty and inherent value of clay, it’s rich history and vibrant present, that it is at once simple and infinitely complex, both fragile and indestructible have all engaged me in a way that feels familiar and new each time I work with it. It allows me to express myself through contemporary imagery in a material that transcends the time of its creation. What used to feel like limitations now feel more like the edges of a map, places to be explored. At present I find myself still incorporating a diverse array of materials but with clay playing a consistent and often central role.