Judy Pfaff: Assistant Rob van Erve
Rob van Erve has worked for Judy Pfaff since 1994, and after twelve years, he has nothing but praise for his boss. “I can’t think the way that she can,” says van Erve, “but I’ve learned an enormous amount here, that I would have never gotten to. Not through the best programs in the world, I think.”
Through a unique fusion of sculpture, architecture, and painting, Pfaff’s dynamic environments exist in both two and free dimensions, exuding an impossible sense of lightness and energy collaged in time and space.
Credits
Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Roger Phenix. Editor: Mark Sutton. Artwork courtesy: Judy Pfaff. Thanks: Rob van Erve.
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Balancing intense planning with improvisational decision-making, Judy Pfaff creates exuberant, sprawling sculptures and installations that weave landscape, architecture, and color into a tense yet organic whole. A pioneer of installation art in the 1970s, Pfaff synthesizes sculpture, painting, and architecture into dynamic environments, in which space seems to expand and collapse, fluctuating between the two- and three-dimensional. Her work is a complex ordering of visual information, composed of steel, fiberglass, and plaster as well as salvaged signage and natural elements such as tree roots. She has extended her interest in natural motifs in a series of prints integrating vegetation, maps, and medical illustrations, and has developed her dramatic sculptural materials into set designs for several theatrical stage productions.
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“Buckets of Rain”
Artist Judy Pfaff discusses the inspiration for and elements of her 2006 installation piece, Buckets of Rain.
