Reviews
San Francisco Chronicle -Datebook
by Kenneth Baker
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Bay Area sculptor Randy Dixon has one terrific piece and several also-rans on view in the Oakland Museum's City Center Sculpture Court.
Scale sets the successful piece apart in more than just dimensions. "Two Doors on Night's Edge" (2005) folds two full-size, hardware-fitted doors into an eccentric structure of floorboards and corrugated metal. The eccentric angular geometry of "Two Doors" makes the piece look as if it might translate, faithfully, a passage from some forgotten cubist-influence picture. The floorboards and slats, the doors and their knobs all awaken the habitual knowledge of such things submerged in the viewer's body.
Dixon calls his pieces "Dream Houses," and they do suggest a search for a sculptural equivalent of the way the dreams form themselves in all their oddity from the body's memory of intentional acts in familiar environments. "Two Doors" elicits physical fears of entrapment, disorientation and loss of control because its scale makes bodily response irresistible. One's imagination looks for footholds and hand holds in the piece, nevermind the flanking "Do Not Touch" signs. We might even see a satire of contemporary architecture's striving for stylishness in Dixon's work.
But the smaller works on view, though they display the same expert cabinetry skills as the centerpiece, read as maquettes rather than fully-realized sculptures. We may hope they are.