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Gay Outlaw
Experimentation with unusual materials, from puff pastry and caramelized sugar to rubber and wood, is a hallmark of San Francisco–based artist Gay Outlaw’s labor-intensive approach to sculpture. She is as adept at transforming ephemeral materials into temporary works as she is at creating complex sculpture on a grand scale.
Outlaw’s most monumental sculpture to date, Black Hose Mountain (1998), weighs two tons, stands ten feet tall, and is more than ten feet wide and deep. A wooden armature serves as the structure for the exterior web of over a mile of black dishwasher drain hoses, filled with white plaster and cut into segments of differing lengths. This work derives from a series of small constructions made of pencils; in both, cylindrical pieces are laid side by side at varying angles, so that viewers’ perception of the work changes as they move around it. From one side the irregular pyramidal form of the “mountain” appears to be black; from another, the white plaster that fills the hoses dominates the view.
Outlaw acknowledges the influence of the late architect and sculptor Tony Smith, whose large quasi-geometric sculptures presaged Minimalism but never partook of Minimalism’s strict eschewal of extra-formal associations. A recent series of sculptures pays homage to the Minimalist structures of Sol LeWitt, beginning with a basic cube that Outlaw alters through a systematic pattern of perforations.
Outlaw grew up in Mobile, Alabama, graduated from the University of Virginia, and studied at the École de Cuisine La Varenne, France. She also studied at the International Center of Photography in New York, where she lived for six years before moving to San Francisco. Outlaw was the recipient of the SECA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1999.
Constance Lewallen
Senior Curator for Exhibitions
