Milton Stevenson at Goppert Gallery
Review, April 2005
477 words

Milton Stevenson: Sculpture
February 3 - March 3, 2006
Goppert Gallery
University of Saint Mary
4100 South 4th Street
Leavenworth, KS 66048

Since graduating from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2004, sculptor Milton Stevenson has accumulated various honors including the H&R Block Artspace Best in Show for the BFA exhibition, the International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement award, and most recently a 2006 Avenue of the Arts commission. His work has been exhibited at Yellow Gallery in Corpus Christi, Texas, and at Leedy-Voulkos Art Center and Dolphin Gallery’s Project Wall in Kansas City, Missouri. It was the Project Wall showing, according to Stevenson, caught the interest of Director Susan Nelson who asked him to exhibit his work at the University of Saint Mary.

In Sculpture, Stevenson includes sculptures, drawings, and one photograph in a selection of work created over the past three years. All of the works, complimenting the exhibition’s nondescript title, are listed as Untitled, an aspect which creates a context for the work that leaves individual pieces defined only by its subject matter, execution, and size. Of this Stevenson notes in his artist statement, “I avoid titles, wishing to leave openness and freedom in conceptual meaning. I do not hope to create an object with an overbearing autonomous connotation. I create art with an amiable ambiguity, leaving any conceptual definitiveness up to the viewer.”

Utilizing found objects from popular consumerist culture, Stevenson takes advantage of the mass quantities of manufactured goods, their bright attractive colors, and their familiar forms to create art that is visually appealing. His execution of materials often provides references to the art culture that he works within through appropriations of works by mainstream Minimalist artists such as Donald Judd, Tom Friedman, and Carl Andres.

Installed on the floor, a small ring of glasses represent one of the first works on display to visitors walking into the gallery. Each short glass is filled to the rim with a mixture of Hawaiian Punch and water. In a color-wheel presentation, Stevenson shows the tints that a solid-bodied red Hawaiian Punch might go through before becoming pure water.

Hanging above this sculpture is a framed digital print depicting a mass of Target shopping carts that have been arranged in a circle made possible by their collapsible storage feature. The Target brand name reoccurs on each cart creating a mantra of brand identification on each cart, as the circle they create mimics the store’s logo by replacing it’s bull’s eye with a symbol of void.