Tackle Box
20’ x 20’ x 3’
Wood, steel, paint, landscape fabric
2021
2021 Mid-Career Fellow
Artist Statement
“Fishing lures act as a conduit between angler and water, allowing them to break the boundaries of the natural world. Their function is attracting fish, by presenting as food or as fight.”
– A Kind of Pain, 2019, a film by Moko Fukuyama
I began incorporating the idea of “lures” into my sculptural practice when I started recreational sport-fishing several years ago. I was intrigued by how lures – which play on the fish’s hyper-sensitivity to water temperature, light, and pressure – function to court fish in their native environments. The angler’s gamble, I came to realize, requires knowing the rules of attraction. These considerations were the inspiration for Tackle Box, 2021, which explores the psychosocial impulses of attraction, and challenges the impulses behind our collective consumerist desires. The colorful and playful sculptures in Tackle Box are a look at the rules of attraction in natural and human ecosystems, a meditation on presentation for the purpose of attraction.
When I arrived at Franconia Sculpture Park in spring 2021, I started collecting dead trees and free materials around the park to turn into “lures.” As I went through the park’s discarded artwork piles – the park generously makes available abandoned artwork from past installations – I found several beautifully-carved fish-shaped sculptures made from heavy logs. After some research, I found that they were created by the artist Robert Ressler. Ressler had significant recognition in the public art realm, and exhibited at many major art institutions in New York City over two decades, but there is almost no information about his career after the early 2000s. In fact, this fish sculpture series presented at Franconia Sculpture Park is his last work that surfaces on the internet.
While Robert Ressler’s life story still remains a mystery, I decided to place his sculptures next to mine, honoring his work within Tackle Box, whose physical layout is inspired by the compartmentalized construction of a fishing tackle box. The installation approaches the idea of “storage” for precious objects, allowing these disparate components to exist in a densely-packed space. Tackle Box meditates on how an artwork transitions from being valuable to being recyclable, on how forgotten artwork lives another life.
There is a possibility that Ressler caught and released his sculptures on purpose – but then, I accidentally fished them out again, and decided that they would become keepers. In talking about his sculpture series, Robert Ressler talks about “equalminity,” one of four sublime attitudes in Buddhism. Ressler states: “I built this sculpture not only to remind myself of the importance of both restraint and self-renewal in the face of life’s endless fluctuations and constant change, but also to remind others that it is wise to not get carried away with the spectrum of our mental, physical, and spiritual states.” In creating Tackle Box, I hope to explore the overlapping terrestrial and aquatic worlds of Minnesota’s St. Croix River Valley, to create a testament of our permanent physical and spiritual recirculation.
Moko Fukuyama
Born: 1981, Chiba, Japan
Resides: Brooklyn, New York, USA
Education: Memphis College of Art, Memphis, TN