with Michel Auder, presented within Follow the Mud, Beeler Gallery, Columbus College of Art & Design, Columbus, OH
Staples and Rubber Bands: Sculpture and Video, 1967–2019 was a collaborative project by Michel Auder and Michael Stickrod, comprising works made individually and collectively and presented across a series of evolving installations within Season Two: Follow the Mud at Beeler Gallery. The project paired Auder’s extensive film and video archive with new editing, archival work, and sculptural installations by Stickrod.
Michael Stickrod, Untitled Bleacher2(Bleachers 1 and 2), 2019, early configuration. Installation view from an earlier instance of Staples and Rubber Bands: Sculpture and Video, 1967–2019, before dried plants were added to the bleacher structures. The skeletal metal and wood forms and cone-shaped speakers were later reconfigured for the presentation of Michel Auder’s May ’68 in ’78. Photo: Stephen Takacs.Michel Auder, May ’68 in ’78, 1978, edited by Michael Stickrod in 2019, with Michael Stickrod, Untitled (Bleachers 1 and 2), 2019, metal, wood, dried plants, and speakers. For Instance No. 3, Stickrod reconfigured the sculptural bleachers and cone-shaped speakers around Auder’s video. Recorded in Paris in 1978, Auder’s video asks friends and strangers to recall the events of May 1968 ten years later. Photo: Stephen Takacs.Installation view of Michel Auder, May ’68 in ’78, 1978, edited by Michael Stickrod in 2019, with Stickrod’s Untitled (Bleachers 1 and 2), 2019. Photo: Stephen Takacs.Installation detail from the presentation of Michel Auder’s May ’68 in ’78 within Staples and Rubber Bands: Sculpture and Video, 1967–2019. Stickrod’s reconfigured sculptural elements extended the video into the gallery, combining metal, wood, dried plants, and speakers to create a physical setting for Auder’s recorded memories. Photo: Stephen Takacs.Installation view with Michael Stickrod, Subversive Historian, 2020. Assembled primarily from an estimated 20,000 hours of footage recorded and collected by Michel Auder over fifty years, together with more recent footage shot by Stickrod, the video appears here among sculptural elements introduced during earlier instances of Staples and Rubber Bands. Their continued presence reflects the cumulative structure of Season Two: Follow the Mud, in which works circulated, accumulated, and intersected over the course of the exhibition. Photo: Stephen Takacs.Michael Stickrod, Untitled (Snake II), 2019, bronze, cherry root ball. Created for the installation of Michel Auder’s Cleopatra (1970), the sculpture was one of two large coiled bronze snakes that extended the film’s mythic references. Photo: Stephen Takacs.Michael Stickrod, Arsinoe’s Leg, 2019, beeswax, aluminum, cherry root ball. A beeswax cast of a human leg clad in beer-can-tab chainmail, the sculpture was created for the installation surrounding Michel Auder’s Cleopatra (1970). Together with the bronze snakes, the work provided a counterpart to the film’s deliberately anachronistic and time-traveling vision of antiquity. Photo: Stephen Takacs.
