Object ID Number: 2016FFMLi2

Object Number: 2016FFMLi2

Notes: When I made Unmet Friend #5 in 2008, I had long since moved past the "Totemic Series Sculptures," but I returned to the work by creating another Unmet Friend. The title comes from the movie, “The Year of Living Dangerously”: a journalist reporting on the Vietnam war wonders about a photographer coming to join the staff. She asks, “Could this be the unmet friend?” Friends we come to know are like pillars, and they are part of the architecture of our lives. Over the years, friends, some now gone, who were all once “unmet friends,” have taken their place in the building of my life. The base of Unmet Friend #5 came from an English Walnut tree that Albert and Mel and I cut in the front yard of an old Pennsylvania farmhouse. The rest of the piece is made, in part robotically, from spalted pecan from a friend's grandfather’s Georgia pecan grove that did not survive a storm. It is meaningful to me to be showing this piece in relation to Silent Witness # 1, Oppenheimer. A young doctoral candidate from Yale (Glenn Adamson), along with Albert LeCoff, chose that piece, and it finally landed in the Yale collection. One can only ask if the sculpture shown in this exhibition might not be Silent Witness #1, Oppenheimer’s unmet friend….