Sarah Tortora
Autodidact
Plywood, pine, wood composites, acrylic & latex paint, enamel. Approx 58”x25”x37, 2020
Autodidact is a painted plywood sculpture from 2020 that has never been shown and is seldom acknowledged in studio visits. It didn’t echo my other works made contemporaneously, but somehow always feels like the most freshly completed work in the studio. As autodidact, the sculpture must come to life as an object cum agent, an agent that possesses the tragic awareness of its material deficiency as a subject, or awareness of its implied and metaphorical voids.
While the sculpture cannot eat, cannot birth, and cannot excrete, in a defeat of Cartesian duality, perhaps Autodidact offers a reminder that psychosomatic instinct inevitably accompanies any desire for knowledge or truth.