Roblog

This Could Be The Hole Ball Game
baseball with pencil, suspended by fishing line
2008

A Little League baseball pierced with a red pencil and hung from Jeffersonian-revival architecture offers a menacing look at the heavy-handed nostalgia of Americanism: as the title implies, this sculpture could be a jury-rigged version of the colonial hole-ball game where children idly attempted to catch a small wooden ball on a stick (a game mainly preserved in nostalgic toys sold in places such as downtown Fredericksburg and Colonial Williamsburg), but even so, this game has been repurposed: it is in midair, suggesting flight, while the pencil becomes an arrow which dually suggests direction and harm. The additional duality of the title refers to the weighty phrase uttered by play-by-play announcers at particularly important moments in a baseball game, one where the outcome can be essentially decided in what would otherwise be an ordinary event. Taken together, these elements inform a larger theme: a deadpan satire on the direness of American nostalgia,  collecting (European-influenced) American iconography that is heavily dependant on reverie for the past and placing it squarely on the shoulder of generations that have not experienced that past.

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For the record, I almost critically injured one of my esteemed professors while setting this up.