Ralph Helmick
Ralph Helmick
Fourteenth Way
Ralph Helmick aims for stillness and contemplation in his work Fourteenth Way. The work references Wallace Stevens’ poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, which begins:
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
Helmick adds the line: And the occasional train.
In Fourteenth Way, Helmick unites the worlds of poetry and sculpture. He employs a sparsity of letters to create the landscape, connecting his interest in visual perception with the importance of lightness of language in modernist poetry. The train runs through this magical dream world, and connects the installation to others in the gallery much as the blackbird links the stanzas in the poem.
Ralph Helmick and Stuart Schechter (whose installation, Plush, also appears in Trainscape) have been collaborating on public art projects since 1994. Typically, they create large images out of smaller objects, incorporating multiple layers of meaning in the relationship between the two.
Ralph Helmick would like to thank studio assistants Nicholas Farnham, Andrea Qampitella, and Neal and Susan Heffron.
Image: Ralph Helmick, Fourteenth Way, (detail), 2007, Lent by the Artist