y=x² (2010)
plywood, douglas fir, black pipe
16′ x 13′ x 8′
Andrew Lewicki’s art points defiantly at the status quo. A graduate of Otis College of Art and Design, Lewicki has crafted a skate ramps and rails out of highly regarded artistic materials like walnut and gold-plated steel. His elegant construction identifies illicit activities like street skating and vandalism, and points out the affinities between fine art and urban subcultures. In recent years, the city of Los Angeles has explored civic “solutions” to such practices by installing legal skate parks and authorized graffiti walls, a tactic Lewicki exposes as both antithetical and irksome to the rebellious spirit inherent in these exploits.
Artists often take inspiration from their own youth subcultures – even in general culture skateboarding has subconsciously made itself part of the air breathed here in SoCal and elsewhere across the world. When artists look at skateboarding they see the implications of the activity – political, sociological, psychological, etc and can react to this, to build on the meaning of it, the content, to look at wider issues. The physical engagement with the activity of skateboarding, as well as the immersion in the subcultures that it generates – with all of its implicit profiles of rebellion, individuality, freedom and separation from mainstream society – can and does create an infrastructure of interpretation of Being. This includes a variety of things in the world, by necessity of course, ranging from the methodology of spatial movement and interaction within the architecture of the urban environment to the idealization of the Self as essentially existential and isolated.
The physiological extremes that the body itself is forced into, with its moments of exhilarating danger, the triumph of will over gravity that heightens the perceptual moment, the adrenaline rush of speed all become inextricably linked to untheorized but present aspects of engagement between the inner self and ones surroundings. All that is needed is the soundtrack and the act of skateboarding becomes its own mythology of experience for the practitioner – one that is shaped by the nexus point where lifestyle, sense of self, motion, movement and the mechanics by which this achieved come together.
This utopian notion of tomorrow set in this cleansed urban environment, seems so peculiar and yet so fitting. The word Tomorrow has so many connotations, but this seems to belie them all. It seems a particular reality of today will seen to be fixed in the future but will it ever be. The hope is still there.
