My favorite exhibitions are the ones that transform reality so that I feel less like I'm in a gallery looking at a picture and more like I'm inside someone's skull and the artwork is the embodiment of their ideas. It is like walking into Willy Wonka's laboratory, with its blend of fantastical foods, dangerous toys and mischief. Tinker would be classified as a sculptor, but his objects are more akin to fabrication than sculpture.
The works assume existing forms such as sweets, fruits and piles of cream. They appear to be a hybrid of Takashi Murakami and Claes Oldenburg's work, and to mesh the clean pop aesthetic and small scale of Murakami's pieces with the everyday objects Oldenburg so loves.
Tinker is a fitting name as it aptly describes his processβtake an object and modify its scale and shape, or embellish its natural outcroppings in the name of improvement. The result is a collection of works that range from the uncanny to the naughty to the sort of gross. Tinker's craft is so consistently refined and flawless that the objects are admirable as examples of restraint and patience. If nothing else, they're handsome examples of Spartan design.
However, the end toward which Tinker aims is usually non-functional, as in his furniture, which is occupied, or his food, which is either too large or too strange to put into one's mouth. What saves the work from being merely decorative or silly one-liners, depending on whom you ask is the collective mood. On their own, I don't know how much thought I would give to the works beyond their craftsmanship, but a quick scan of the gallery reveals a number of similarities between the somewhat disparate objects, indicating an ongoing thought process.
It's a little harder to grasp what that thought process is. However, a careful inspection of the titles, forms and the artist's statement convinces me the artist knows where he's going. I do get the sense there is a lot of sexual tension. The following is a list of words that came up in titles or in my own notes that are either slang for something dirty or at least sound dirty: nuts, stool, honey pot, coconuts, lactation, cream, lily, pulse, veiny, nipple, dripping, kumquat and Turning Japanese.
