PUTNEY — Landmark College is currently displaying an exhibition of Dave Cole's artwork including a monumental new piece, “Machine Dreams.”
Cole is a 1997 alumnus of Landmark College, a graduate of Brown University, and a prominent contemporary artist included in public and private collections worldwide.
Commissioned by Landmark College, this exhibition includes a 1950s Farmall tractor that Cole has repurposed into a printing machine. This project is loaded with biography, as the tractor has been in Dave's family for three generations and is the last remnant of the rural environment in which he grew up.
In this work, the machines earthly labor is redirected towards the performative creation of large abstract prints.
Cole's works exist “in a cosmology of relations mediated by a deep engagement with materiality, a rather perverse sense of humor, and an obsession with power as represented through an embrace of all things mechanical,” according to a news release.
In Cole's diorama, machines and inanimate objects are re-purposed and trained into performing in ways not dreamt of or intended by their original designers: Giant John Deere excavators knit an equally gargantuan American flag, for instance, or a 13-ton Caterpillar Vibratory Asphalt Compactor, turned into a mechanical musical box, hauntingly plays 'The Star-Spangled Banner.'
Cole has presented solo exhibitions at Mass MoCA, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Norton Museum of Art, and The Norwegian National Gallery among others. Most recently, Brown University's David Winton Bell Gallery presented a multi-venue mid-career retrospective of Cole's work.
He will exhibit some of these major works at Landmark College through Nov. 12.