Gregory Vose animates his stone sculpture with intriguing ambiguity. Upon first viewing, many of his large pieces have the primal force of ancient stone works, ritual steles or astronomical markers. Yet a closer look often reveals anthropomorphic qualities — posts become legs, curved surfaces swell into suggestions of buttocks and breasts. The prehistoric suddenly morphs into contemporary abstraction, and somewhere in the transition, humor — an integral element in Vose’s art — is released.

Vose’s Astroflamboozle, is a fine example. From a distance, this eight-foot-tall limestone work looks like a celebratory monument of some kind, an open-hearted song to the sky. Or a cartoonish giant with a gaping mouth. Upon closer examination, it becomes a stripped-down infernal machine, like the clumsy astrolabe of a Medieval navigator or an idiot savant. Then the details are revealed – the finely flaked surfaces of the legs, perfectly shaped stone orb perched at the front, inset bronze disks with cast forms that echo elements of the northern New Mexico landscape in which the piece is sited. The obvious care invested in these details suggests a seriousness of purpose and urges us to question relationships and look for meaning.

And sure enough, spend time with Astroflamboozle, watch how shadows are cast by the sun on particular elements, and one discovers that the piece is indeed a kind of calendar or cosmic clock, revealing the intimate, never changing like between earth and the heavens, the macro and the micro. Astroflamboozle’s stands in it’s owner’s backyard near Taos, and as the sun sets behind a mountain on the western horizon, on the same day every year, it casts a shadow that bisects a bronze disk on which Vose has modeled the profile of that same mountain. It’s artful reassurance that in the universe at least, everything is working as it should.

Stephen Parks, November, 2008