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Jerry Ehrlich

Jerry uses materials that are easily accessible to him and that excite an allegorical reference. He has spent 50 years playing with different materials. Sometimes in response to ideas, other times to push the material and see what ideas flowed therefrom. He spent much of the last ten years focused on rebar.  Rebar is found around large construction sites and subsequently junkyards. Its use is as the skeletal armature for the poured concrete with which the structure to be built is formed and framed. Surrounded by concrete, the tension inherent in the steel holds the concrete in compression adding strength to the static load. The tension is directional.  Add energy either through gravity or heat and the rebar expresses itself in ways although characteristic of the material which is not reflective of its intended use.
He uses rebar and other construction detritus to explore the nature of the material and discuss the dialectic relationship between use and reuse, between energy and tension, static and active, inside and out, between container and contained, and moment and time.

Of late he has been combining found materials with any of the materials and techniques that allow for a more spontaneous discussion of the same ideas that have always interested him but he feels as he ages those questions get more refined thus distilling the responses to more a straightforward rendering.

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