Robin Tost: Scrap Metal Quilts
Cahoon Museum of American Art • Cotuit, MA • cahoonmuseum.org • Through December 23, 2022
Robin Tost is a dedicated practitioner of re-cycling and re-creating, as fully evidenced in her exhibition, Scrap Metal Quilts, at the Cahoon Museum of American Art. Western Massachusets-based Tost collects—you name it—automotive scrap, gutters, shed tin, tin cans, advertising signs, and other found materials from roadsides, transfer stations, and scrapyards; cuts them by hand into “patches” to be fit into a quilt design, traditional or free form; and uses a drill press to punch precise holes into the patches. Then she sews the pieces together with wire. The results are wonderful.
The works range from her first full-metal quilt, Rust (2008), her paean to corrosion comprised of pulls, grates, and tools plus washers, wires, and screens, to Kubo Totem, a fierce copper-tinged icon, created for this show, offset by scintillating Klimt-like gold and silver disks and squares.
For Crazy Quilt, which diverges from traditional quilt patterns, Tost designed each square individually and then assembled them into a captivating, dizzying layout. Each of the 63 squares would please a lover of abstract expressionism.
Some works are representational, such as Winter Sunrise, with striated gutters that resemble birch trees, while others are evocative, such as Fountain, with its flowing patchwork of many blues. Also on view, a few assemblages made of found objects of wood and metal, including the whimsical Trojan Chicken—on metal wheels.
Tost has recently transformed her flat quilts into large, more realistic, 3-D creations. Spirit Bear, arrayed in white, silver, and icy blues patches, is Tost’s salute to the mythic white bear. Her exuberant Phoenix ascends from a side lawn of the museum, while fanciful Cecilia, a giant sea serpent, slithers through the museum’s front lawn. All three statues have enjoyed stays at The Mount’s annual SculptureNow exhibition in Lenox, MA.
Found art and refuse transformed into art have always prompted viewers to see anew the things and materials that comprise our quotidian lives—and overload our landfills. To reframe an old adage, “Junk is beautiful in the eye of the beholder.” Here we are the fortunate witnesses to Tost’s masterful fashioning of the discarded into the magical.
Plus, on view from November 9–December 2022, Andrea Moore: An American Artist and Her English Garden and Pauline Lim: Travels in My Armchair.
—Jack Curtis