''Styrobot'': Michael Salter's new exhibit is too much

By Leo B. Carter     11/6/08 6:00pm

Every conceivable size and shape of packing Styrofoam covered the floor of the Rice Gallery on Wednesday in a confusion of cultural refuse, from which Michael A. Salter sought to create order and beauty.His exhibit too much, which opened yesterday in Sewall Hall, consists partly of the gray walls covered in a sea of yellow graphic icons that resemble warning signs with isolated and abstract messages. One icon is an anthropomorphic ice cream cone with the grimace and gloves of a boxer. Another is a gumball machine containing an infant in utero. These images are adaptable to viewers' unique personal interpretations.

"Each individual icon or graphic can be open to an infinite number of narratives," Salter said.

The focus of the installation, though, is the behemoth Styrofoam robot slumped in one corner, which, if standing, would surpass 25 feet in height. Salter said this is his largest robot yet and said he wanted to make the robot's head bowed to make it appear exhausted or overwhelmed.

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One foot alone contains 50 different sculpted and carefully fitted pieces, and Salter guessed that thousands of such pieces are contained within the body of the beast. The intricate circuit board of the chest is ironically devoid of computer parts. What remains is only the Styrofoam casts of the world of manufacture.

Much like in the previous exhibit at the Rice Gallery, Aurora Robson's The Great Indoors, the artist is working with the world's recycled garbage with the hope of speaking in some way to the human condition. Salter said he had been working for many years with found objects - materials that anyone can find in abundance in their daily lives.

Salter said that he is unrestricted by medium. He resists the "Old World thought that you should focus in a discipline," and instead works with a variety of materials in each installation.

Salter said he finds as much inspiration in art museums as he might in the aisles of a dollar store, which he describes as graphically and culturally stunning.

"I'm a huge fan of the high and the low," he said.

Salter acknowledges that his work seems to simultaneously criticize and embrace the material culture of America.

"My work exists at this funny nexus or zeitgeist between design, commerciality and art," he said. "I'm really comfortable in this gray area."

His work is meant as both high art and a commonplace cultural product, and he hopes for its dissemination into various strata of the cultural commercial amalgam.

After seeing this exhibit, the viewer is left with merely an impression of popular culture, mass media and technology. Taken as a whole, the exhibit is hard to make sense of. It is the cohesion of slightly familiar and slightly alien images, but within it, each individual element can be isolated and interpreted independently. Salter said his form can be called "Pop Surrealism." He draws from a vast array of personal influences like his childhood appetite for science fiction (such as his fanaticism for Star Trek and Star Wars) as well as the overwhelming influx of media, popular culture and technology in the Western world. It is this chaos of images and information that he expresses in his art.

"Culturally, artists are barometers," he said. "Their job is to reflect the world around them."

Salter said that what he is laying out for his audience is not an explicit meaning or answer, but the product of the sensory overload that contributes to his synthesis of the world.

"Hopefully, we can all go look at the world a little bit differently afterwards," he said.

Salter will be speaking today at noon in front of the Rice Gallery. There will be refreshments served and free pins and stickers of Salter's art. For more information, check out michaelsalter.com or the Rice Gallery's Web site, ricegallery.org.

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