St. Sebastian

An Oberlin College art department faculty member from 1989–94, Ellen Garvens produced this assemblage in response to the AMAM’s polychromed sculpture of St. Sebastian on view in the Stern gallery nearby. The present work’s corpus of twisted, bound, and pierced copper tubes evokes the agony of the saint’s tortured body, pierced with numerous arrows. The metal construction’s abstract composition contrasts with photographic details of the wooden sculpture’s lifelike form. St. Sebastian is one of Garvens’s series of wall reliefs, which combine photography with found industrial materials. Garvens, who previously worked as a scientific illustrator, saw this juxtaposition as an opportunity to study the relationships between different media: “By comparing and contrasting three-dimensional materials and two-dimensional photographs, the medium of each expands the limitations of the other; where one leaves off the other picks up.”