A Souvenir of the Minnesota State Fair, 1910 (Butter Roosevelt)
7’10” x 48’6” x 19’4”
Fiberglass reinforced concrete, steel
2018
2018 Open Studio Fellow
Artist Statement
In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt visited the Minnesota State Fair. To commemorate the visit, the sculptor John Karl Daniels created a life-size butter sculpture of the former President. Looking at Daniel’s body of work today, it seems monotonous in its depictions of heroic white men, dead and alive. The butter sculpture of Roosevelt sculpture is particularly heavy-handed, depicting the President in full safari gear with his foot on the head of a lion we assume he has recently killed. Today, the work seems almost cartoonish in its depiction of a violent, imperialist white masculinity. Yet, when we imagine this form rendered in the fatty medium of refrigerated butter, it veers toward the absurd. While it exists today as only a single photograph, this object serves as the point of departure for my project at Franconia Sculpture Park.
As a maker of sculpture, I am interested in the way we re-interpret and re-tell the past through the filter of our current experience. These re-tellings also manifest themselves as objects: the museum replica, the diorama, the stage set, or the laboriously hand-sewn and fussily detailed garments of a reenactor. Making my own meticulous replicas of historical objects generates its own little slippages and elisions, whether or not my objects can ‘pass’ as authentic. These slippages connect us to larger ideas about how we write and re-tell history, questioning the narratives we choose to emphasize and those we neglect.
Lewis Colburn
Born: Cedar Falls, IA, 1982
Resides: Philadelphia, PA
Education
MFA, Syracuse University, 2009
BA, St. Olaf College, 2005