Rona Pondick

Pondick, Rona

(b Brooklyn, NY, 18 April 1952).

American sculptor. Pondick received a BA from Queens College, New York, in 1974 and in 1977 an MFA from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, where she studied with the sculptor Richard Serra. She first exhibited her provocative, surreal works, deeply rooted in primal urges and impulses, in the late 1980s. Both fascinated and repelled by the writings of Freud, Pondick returned in her sculpture to the oral and anal stages of development, prodding the viewer to confront these fixations and their related taboos. Focusing on such fetish objects as the breast, teeth, excrement, and shoes as subject-

Rona Pondick: Milk, mixed media, left: 558.8×889×812.8 mm, right: 558.8×838.2×812.8…matter, she unleashed repressed anxieties related to basic bodily functions, infantile desires, and adult sexuality. Pondick also employed repetition to great effect in works that range from the deadly serious to the darkly absurd. In the sculpture Milk (1989), Pondick conflated multiple images of the baby bottle with the female breast, fashioning two white spherical mounds from seemingly saturated sacs of paper towels capped by rubber nipples. These visceral objects simultaneously invoke the world of the nursing child and the erotic impulses of the adult male to create witty emblems of orality. Her works also acknowledge both attraction and repulsion. In Little Bathers (1990–91), an unnerving assemblage of 500 crudely shaped bubble-gum pink balls sporting old, yellowed teeth, the cackling mouths seem to reduce human behaviour to pure appetite.

Rona Pondick: Dog, yellow stainless steel, 711.2×419.1×812.8 mm, 1998–2001; photo…In an interview with art critic Octavio Zaya (2001), Pondick stated: ‘I made meaning in the past by creating, repeating and scattering a proliferation of images that surrounded and engulfed the viewer. Now I want to do the exact opposite and make self-contained objects.’ Strikingly, these objects are monstrous human/animal hybrids in which the artist seamlessly joined life casts of her head or limbs with the sculpted bodies of animals including a dog, a cougar, a fox, a marmot, and an antic gang of monkeys. In contrast to the malleable materials and found objects that comprised her earlier work, Pondick began to employ stainless steel, aluminium, bronze, and industrial rubber, combining traditional sculptural modelling and casting techniques with digital imaging technology to create her art. While the human components of Pondick’s stainless steel Dog (1998–2001), for example, are meticulously rendered and life-like with a matte surface suggesting the texture of skin, the animal parts of these creatures are highly polished, reflective, and seemingly liquid, as the disparate forms simultaneously merge and differentiate. Drawing on ancient mythological hybrids, such as the sphinx and monsters depicted in Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Indian art, as well as modern references including Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Pondick’s sculptures may be both nightmare objects and poignant images of introspection. Her work is always physically and psychologically disturbing yet oddly compelling, as she delves into the unconscious mind to expose the animal desire behind the civilized mask. Pondick has stated: ‘Fear and desire are two words I’ve always thought describe my work.’

Bibliography

T. R. Myers: ‘Presenting Pleasures: Urgent Sculptures of Rona Pondick’, A. Mag., 65 (Nov 1990), pp. 90–95

S.-A. Van der Zijpp and P. Weiermair: Rona Pondick Works 1986–2001 (New York, 2002)

G. Fifield: ‘Rona Pondick’s Monsters of Fear and Desire’, Sculpture, 22(7) (Sept 2003), pp. 35–9

Rona Pondick: The Metamorphosis of an Object (exh. cat. by S. L. Stoops and others, Worcester, MA, A. Mus., Sept 2009)

Helaine Posner

Retrieved from:

Helaine Posner. "Pondick, Rona." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 22 Feb. 2017. .