Alice Aycock

In the early 1970s Alice Aycock found her “muse” in architecture. Her large-scale, Minimalist-inspired work staged encounters inflected with a sense of precariousness, in which spectators navigated mazes, climbed ladders, or crawled through cramped enclosures. Untitled (Shanty) marked a shift in Aycock’s work toward “nonfunctional architecture”—irrational sculptures entered imaginatively rather than physically. Described by the artist as a “medieval wheel house,” Untitled (Shanty) is a rudimentarily carpentered wood hut, roof pitched with four gables, front door swung open, propped on a platform, and set against a pair of ladders inscribed within a wheel. While the wheel recalls a primitive mechanism for a watermill or a torture device, its function is not discernable; even if the shack were large enough for a person, it would still be inaccessible, perched several feet above the ground. The works that followed this piece— frequently public art commissions in steel, aluminum, plastic, and wood—are massive, theatrical pseudo-architectural and mechanical structures, similarly evoking utilitarian forms but not made for practical use. Drawing from a heterogeneous set of architectural, scientific, literary, and occult sources (Thai legends, ancient Egyptian tombs, Bauhaus design, tantric drawings, microchips, and autobiographical experiences), Aycock’s repertoire of claustrophobia- and vertigo-inducing forms variously suggests amusement-park rides, turbines, towers, and temples. According to the artist, her syntheses of architectural and symbolic elements investigate the relationship between the way people produce tools—whether arrowheads or rocket ships—and the structure of our minds, plumbing the limits of human imagination and thinking.