Chuck Mahley’s latest sculpture of a mixed media skeletal tri-ped endures as an amalgamation of material, craftsmanship and allusion. Two crutches attached to wooden insect-like appendages raise a suggested skeletal torso assembled from an aluminum bicycle frame. Planted firmly in tension, a third wooden leg, equine in nature, bears the weight of an intricate spinal curvature which arcs up from the back of the aluminum torso and extends to greet the viewer as a trunk like appendage that ends with a short shaft muzzled by a black rubber grip; creating what appears to be an anthropomorphic sci-fi creature. The combination of the extended muzzled trunk and the black rubber grip serves as an invite to touch, a connection point between the viewer and the sculpture. This appealing invitation to move in from a distance and experience the sculpture in relation to the body is the point in which the work begins to break down.
While Mahley’s creation gestures towards an implied engagement or manipulation, these actions are soon betrayed. What appeared to be well crafted, movable spinal connections and leg joints are instead tacked into place by hastily shot brad nails. What was once preconceived as kinetic is discovered to be frozen. Instantly a work that once stood on its own is transformed into a prop, a stand-in for a predisposed notion.
The breakdown of an inferred craftsmanship begins to unhinge the locomotive materiality of the sculpture as the crutches, a device of support for the lame or infirm, become undermined by the brad nails whose purpose attempts to serve the same objective. It is through this collapse of function that the sculpture, at first playful and inviting, fails to sustain its imaginative possibilities.
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