Untitled (Shanty)
1978

In Untitled (Shanty), Alice Aycock transforms a common building type into an object of mystery that transcends the original function of its architecture. She elevates the vernacular architectural structure (quite literally) on splayed stilts and frames it within a wooden ring, toward which it reaches with ladder-like wooden arms. The materials and construction methods suggest practical use, but the building has no function; the open door invites entry, but the shanty is too small for human habitation. The configuration, moreover, evokes a number of different iconic images: a five-pointed star, a Tantric circle, and Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man–an ideally proportioned man with outstretched limbs touching the contour of the perfect circle. Although one foot of the sculpture seems planted in Renaissance humanism and the other in Eastern mysticism, the plainspoken materials are rooted in the Pennsylvania farm where Aycock grew up.