Private Splashes
February 14 - March 14, 2003

I spend my time empathizing with small details of the drips, squishes, and blooms I find; exploring the private spaces of my body for forms that speak to me of big mysteries. In an exploration and hyper-realistic study of the human form, I search out and distill parts of me that sag, swell, squirt, and pucker.
When isolated from the rest of the body, orifices, splashes and drips begin to echo and resonate with things outside of myself. An anus starts to look like a flower or a depiction of geological forces underground, a squirt reminds me of an apparition appearing from nowhere, or that first moment life materialized from nothingness.

I observe the body, sculpt it as I see it, find some otherness in the form, and then change something in the form to take it closer to that “otherness”. When I first saw a picture of an anus I was awestruck. I had never thought of an anus in any visual sense. What struck me was that this thing, whose sole purpose was to push out looked like it was sucking in. When I sculpted it large (the first one was nine feet high), it became this huge hungry hole that seemed to have a life and intelligence of its own. It seemed to stare, push out, and suck in. When I cast it and pulled it off the wall, it had a hint of a splash, or vortex appearing out of nowhere. To accentuate the qualities that were not anus, the qualities of some otherness, I cut the perimeter of the form, changing it from a perfectly round frontal silhouette to a wavy, splashy one. The result was I higher energy splash, one that was quicker and more instantaneous. At some point I thought of things or concepts that appear out of nothing, one was the Big Bang theory. To make my anus splash into a Big Bang, I added a second splash to the backside of the first. The resulting form was the one in my Private Splashes exhibition. Big Bang looks as though it is a model of a phenomenon that burst out from a single point. Big Bang is solid and formless, bodily and botanical, stagnant and instantaneous.

I am interested in my work confronting the viewer with their own body, causing private and public reflection. I want my work to find ways to make people question their acts of labeling, categorizing and naming. I am also interested in dissecting beauty, in the act of finding the sublime in the unnoticed and abject parts of our-selves. Most important, I am interested in finding clues that lead me to mysteries.

For more information, please visit Dietrich Wegner's website.

The Sculpture Center is dedicated to enhancing our community's appreciation of sculpture by fostering the careers of emerging sculptors and promoting the preservation of outdoor sculpture. It is located in University Circle at 1834 East 123rd Street.

Gallery hours: Monday through Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Saturday 12:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. (Free Parking is available.)