Tiny Assemblages

I went to college with a guy named Scott Rolfe. For one year or maybe two, we both lived on the quiet floor, in one of the nicer dorms.

Scott is pretty quiet. I suspect that sometimes I was quieter than I was at other times. I had an illegal pet chinchilla who required a lot of exercise, so I’d let him out of his aquarium and into the hallway, which was fun and exciting until it was time for it to get him back in. At that point, the whole thing became impossible and exasperating. The process of ensnaring often involved a lot of other people. Scott sometimes helped with the ensnaration.

For me, chinchilla wrassling was approximately sixteen hundred hobbies ago; I have since hung up my teeny, tiny rope, and retired.

Scott had and still has a longer lasting pursuit, which was making art. He was the first person I ever met to make what he called “found object art.”

He’d find something shiny and think about it and put it together with other shiny or not shiny things he had found, and suddenly, he would have a precious sculpture that had a life of its own, out of bits of this and that.

Things like this amazed me. They still amaze me. I go in for the written arts, and the tasty arts, and sometimes, the musical arts. But when it comes to creating visual arts, I’m stumped. However, I definitely know what I appreciate.

Scott has recently come up with a series that I truly appreciate.

These small animalpomorphic pieces really have personalities and lives of their own, though they are like, bolts and paint and squiggles and bits of strainer. But then suddenly, whoops, there is an actual whale!

Or something with feet, and not just feet, but feet that hint at how funny and charismatic the little made-up animal is.

Scott lives in Austin. This is his website. It will please you.