Judy Pfaff: Assistant Ryan Muller
Ryan Muller acts as an assistant to sculptor Judy Pfaff, working in the artist’s studio in Tivoli, New York. While Muller is an artist himself, his history lies in years of experience in construction.
“As an artist myself, or as somebody who is constantly trying to make their own art, she taught me a lot,” says Muller. “She’s in the studio constantly… She was just saying earlier that a lot of her work gets done after we leave.”
Credits
Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Roger Phenix. Editor: Mark Sutton. Artwork courtesy: Judy Pfaff. Thanks: Ryan Muller.
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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.
Installation and Drawing
Judy Pfaff discusses her artistic processes and inspirations, as well as the roles that romance, feminism, and environmentalism play in her work.
