Shape Report, Expanded

By Erin K Drew

The Shape Report is an evolving index of found form, aleatory assemblage and folk sculpture seen while walking around.

It surveys the territory somewhere between Googie’s Atomic populism and UnMonumental sculpture’s improv comedy. It fancies Googie’s graphic legibility and “low brow” sensibilities (think hotdog stands shaped like wieners). It shares The UnMonumental’s interest in collage outside the gallery frame. At the end of the day, it loves a laff in the built environment.

I don’t remember exactly when I decided to train my sights on shape, but it was around when I came out as a Minimalist Sculptor.

Minimalist

As detailed elsewhere, my MFA critiques seemed to frame my artwork as kitschy and retro, concerned with thrift store acquisitions and gift shop souvenirs—nothing slick or digital. I considered myself to be INTERROGATING AMERICAN ACCUMULATION by dragging a pillow case full of broken angels into the desert, installing nuns in abandoned grottoes to be riddled with bullet holes, photographing bonneted cacti at mountain outposts, spines perforating their paper wimples.

Bonnetcore cactus at Cactus Joe’s, 2020.

I was assuming a brazen posture, cutting through inhospitable terrains in my Toyota Camry, nurturing my isolated aueteur persona, especially in the thick of quarantine.

My MATERIAL was the multiple gin and tonics I downed at the dive bars far from the Strip.

My CONTENT was excess and abjection, hallucinatory logic wreathed in blinking lights.

My work at the Las Vegas Neon Museum fanned this flame.

I’d give 45 minute tours of the collection peppered with bad stand up comedy on 100 degree nights. Wearing a safari hat and tiny amplifier around my neck, I’d bellow across the stagnant desert air. I’d gesture at golden nuggets studded with broken bulbs, four pointed stars crowning a stylized mushroom cloud and giant decontextualized letter forms as grasshoppers bounced around and incinerated in the colored footlights.

Silver nugget and broken stuff, photographer at the Neon Museum, Las Vegas, 2021-22.

At home in my tiny casita apartment I read Amy Sillman’s landmark essay (emphasis mine) “Further Notes on Shape.” To wit, once you start seeing shape, you can’t unsee it. Reading this queer painter’s account of Ab Ex boy brawls over form (91) snapped my own concerns into focus.

When it came time to stage my thesis, I had to make my aesthetic loyalties crystal clear.

I bought a black leather jacket and painted it in hot red paint with an oblong inverted heart cribbed from Ellsworth Kelly. I emblazoned the back edge with text from an imaginary motorcycle club, Ellsworth’s Angels, and posed in front of an expanse of chain link fence for a portrait. It was my 38th birthday and I was announcing myself as a Minimalist Sculptor.

Yes, I was hand stitching psychedelic bunting and injuring my wrists making log cabin quilts, but they were edged in metal grommets and stretched across in steel frames.

We contain multitudes.

Photo by Keeva Lough, 2022.

Overlay

Amy Sillman asks: “Is there a poetics of shape ?…Is it that shape doesn’t have a specific substance, a commodity - attached to it, like color and pigment? “

The subjects of the Shape Report don’t have a commodity attached; they’re strictly NFS. I feel the instinct to align them with visionary art environments, roadside attractions and unaccredited “museums,” where sometimes the biggest challenge is finding the front door. One doesn’t simply drop the coordinates of these public artworks into Google Maps. Point of discovery is part of the charm.

Jazz

The best Report Shapes are architecture with a human touch—duets between geometry and junk, always with an element of surprise. That’s where the comedy comes in.

“This is exactly how I’ve seen art: as the sensation of ill-fitting parts” says Sillman, (94).

In line, my friends and I used to meet Sunday nights for live jazz at a club called the Chatterbox in Indianapolis, where we’d watch the musicians and draw. One drawing game was : What’s the jazziest shape ? My answer was flat asterisk. This points to midcentury design’s influence on the genre, album art framing sound. Alvin Lustig’s interrobangs & S Neil Fujita’s metered geometry.

It also highlights the importance of improvisation in the creation of a good Shape, and its relationship to other elements—sound, time, the elements and The Absurd.

Anonymous was a Minimal Sculptor

The “creators” of these Shapes are mostly anonymous. I am not interested in claiming authorship over their actions or the shapes themselves. While my documentation may carry a charge of auspicious framing, I view the Shapes as collaborations. There’s perfect geometry to be found in the Goodwill bins, where a melted ice cream sandwich can be found inside a Lucy Lippard book. These are free associated poetics. It is my pleasure to amplify their mysterious frequencies.

Sources:

Amy Sillman, “Further Notes on Shape,” Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings, After 8 Books, 2020.

Erin K Drew is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, researcher and educator living in Los Angeles, CA since getting her MFA at University of Nevada Las Vegas in 2022.

Past and present projects can be seen on her website, Instagram and her Substack, Museum Putty, where she blogs about art, visual culture, folk forms and feminist semiotics.

Posted and published by Erin K Drew on April 20, 2025.