About the brand
History
The work starts with objects that stopped being seen. A hot dog. An ear of corn. A seesaw at rest.
Cast in polished metal, at a scale they were never meant to hold, these things stop being useful and start being looked at. The surface returns your face where it is taken to a mirror and absorbs it where it is held at satin — a decision made plane by plane, by hand, on every example.
The subjects are ordinary on purpose. That is the whole proposition: attention paid to what was there all along.
Formats
Each sculpture is made at one of three heights, and the three come from the same number. Format 11 stands at 28 cm. Format 33 stands at 84 cm — thirty-three inches. Format 66 stands at 168 cm. A third, the unit, and the double.
Relief and Triptych fall outside the scale. A work made for a wall is measured by the wall, not by the figure standing in front of it.
The same number sets the edition: thirty-three examples, numbered, and no more.
The artist
Elker Torres was born in Colombia, into a middle-class family, and began making things long before he had a word for what he was doing.
He emigrated to the United States more than thirty years ago. The dislocation of that move — learning to read a second culture from the outside — became the material he has worked with ever since: the ordinary object, seen by someone for whom nothing ordinary was yet familiar.
He lives and works in Central Florida, where he is a father as well as an artist, and where that way of looking became a full-time occupation.
I don't invent objects. I just never got used to them.