ABOUT KEVIN CARON

My first love was for machinery. Its immaculate steel composition and constructed perfection afforded orchestrated movement, followed by the joy of private solitude. Those passions came together while riding my motorcycle, when I first began to feel and see Time, rather than identify with its metaphoric measurements.

As I rode bigger, faster, more capable motorcycles, I noticed that just over 20 mph, everything ceased to exist, and I found myself with an ability to slow down my perception of time. I learned to melt into an altered reality, which was defined by a simple formula: higher speed, less thought. Suddenly, time became fluid and I had enough of it to choose where to turn next while mitigating treacherous desert curves and sudden hills. My mind became void of the incessant chatter of thoughts and strategies. Instead, it was replaced with pure force of instinct and intense clarity about what lay ahead. I felt as if I were flying slightly above ground, hugging the textured topography with my body, steering the roaring engine beneath me as an extension of myself.

Although I did not know it then, my education as an artist seems synonymously tied to the roads I have consumed on a motorcycle and later behind the wheel of an 80,000 pound semi truck. I spent more than 30 years meditating and molding shapes in my mind, so when an opportunity to sculpt my first piece presented itself, the transition from mental manipulation to the creation of real steel structures was seamless and effortless.

Now I focus on the sensuality of shapes, the gentle rise and fall of their sides and junctures. I enjoy the challenges of creating monumental public works, which allow me to work in a scale and variety of proportion that smaller pieces sometimes resist. I download shapes and spaces from my mind that were already analyzed, conceived and cataloged many years ago before I even knew I wanted to be a sculptor and let my hands become an extension of my mind, very much like I do when I am riding.

With each passing year, time emerges as a single argument, and as I continue to ride, it affects how I observe the line ahead of me, the movement of air, the machinery that carries me off into the distance, and the shape of the landscape around me. Now space appears as a consequence, not a cause. Lines outline the curves of each road I travel. Volume and mass fill the emptiness In my work I seek out illusion in contour and its capacity, treating unusual intersections as purposeful

 composition. And although I am still unsure if knowledge is imparted by a creative force rather than acquired and accumulated through hard work, I believe that even the most commonplace experiences accumulate into unanticipated works of art.           

 -- Kevin Caron