Interventions: Cayetano Ferrer

The foundations of Cayetano Ferrer’s sculptures and installations involve notions surrounding the remnant. Starting with a fragment—an ancient textile, a found piece of carved wood, a section of marble, or even an Art Deco-era ashtray removed from a casino lobby—the artist utilizes an array of technological methods to incorporate such objects into the larger scheme of his imagination. His work renders the obsolete and defunct both current and functional while also establishing entirely new values and contexts for objects that are most often overlooked.

In the second presentation of the Museum’s series, Interventions—whereby an artist is invited to work within the context of the Museum’s permanent collection—Ferrer creates an installation of recent work specifically for SBMA’s historic Ludington Court. Taking advantage of the empty space, Ferrer installs existing and specially fabricated works that interact with not only the surrounding space but also rarely displayed objects from the Museum vaults. The objects Ferrer selected for his installation are classical stone and marble architectural fragments, including Roman columns, capitals, and other embellishments dating from the First Century CE, related to the well-known antiquities customarily on view in Ludington Court, but considered unworthy of permanent display. By highlighting these objects, the artist not only advances his own ongoing investigations into the concept of remnants, but also calls upon the audience as well as the Museum to consider them in unconventional ways.

Image Credit: Cayetano Ferrer, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2015 (installation view)