The one artist who does get into some unpredictably peculiar territory is Robert Taplin , who creates small, comical, semi-realistic narrative sculptures featuring the character Punch, a traditional English clown with a long nose and a conical hat. Made of white cast resin, the sculptures look as if they were carved from marble by an eccentric 18th-century Frenchman, but the dreamlike episodes they describe have a decidedly modern weirdness.
In one, Punch makes love to a woman in a fancy party dress. In others he appears homeless pushing a shopping cart full of cast-off junk, receives a prize (a small replica of the Statue of Liberty) from a group of men in business suits, and furtively urinates into a large vase. These and other enigmatic vignettes have a delightfully creepy and disquieting psychology.
The prize for the funniest artist definitely should go to Jeff "Jeffu" Warmouth for his sculptures, digital photographs, and video documenting an outer space exploration program called "Spudnik " developed by a race of anthropomorphic potatoes. The deadpan video describing how potato scientists learned to harness intestinal gases as a means to propel "potatonauts" on rockets to other planets is hilarious, and models of vehicles for extraterrestrial travel made from pots, pans, utensils, aluminum foil, and other kinds of kitchenware are quite clever. Warmouth would have to push his ideas to greater extremes to achieve artistic profundity, but what he has done so far is undeniably entertaining.
Also promising are the complicated, large-scale, organically shaped baskets woven by Nathalie Miebach . The baskets have numerous curious elements added on: configurations of colored dowels, wooden balls, spools of string, numbered lengths of tape or pipe, and other hard-to-identify doodads.
