For a specific site in the Dallas Museum of Art’s Sculpture Garden, Mark Handforth has created an enormous, lively, and surreal sculpture standing over fifteen feet tall. Made by “braiding” or “interlocking” basically three industrial found objects—an I-beam found at a demolition site, a working red-lighted lamppost, and huge anchor chains (each a foot long)—the work is perceived as a giant cobra snake, uncoiling and dancing, its red head reaching above the garden walls. In his proposal to the Museum, the artist stated, “The chain snake is an oversized readymade, an aggrandized piece of folk art—the kind of thing you might put your mailbox on, but of catastrophic proportion.”
Concentrations 51: Mark Handforth
March 23–September 24, 2007
