On View with Shaw Jewelry

Eight works by Robert S. Neuman are on view in a group exhibition at Shaw Contemporary Jewelry in Northeast Harbor, ME. The works are on view from August 12th through August 25th.

All of the works are from Neuman’s ‘Monuments’ series, which seeks to redefine contemporary monument-making. In a world bristling with monuments to famed politicians, visionaries and philanthropists, Neuman often found himself wondering if perhaps ordinary folks deserved their own monuments too. And if they did, what would those monuments look like? To build such a monument would be to celebrate the quiet dignity of everyday life. Nueman builds his Monument to No One in Particular series with a cacophony of forms—stamped disks, prickly rectangles and teetering pyramids of pure color—to evoke the cascade of ephemera that passes through our everyday lives and the precariousness of it all.

These quivering towers also evoke the trail cairns that dot hiking paths near Neuman’s summer home on Mount Desert Island. Cairns are triangular piles of rocks that are constructed to guide hikers along their journeys and are made from whatever can be found nearby. Neuman saw an instant kinship between the cairns and the monuments he’d dreamed up. Like much of our lives, they’re built out of ordinary stuff but are vital to helping us move along our way.