JASON CYTACKI

Sculptures

My Installation works continue a sense of artificially constructed reality, functioning as life-size physical iterations of the models created for my paintings.  Here, however, the places are very specific and personal. Pieces of walls, furniture, and objects are all recreations from my childhood home in Indiana and related spaces. Although these images reflect my personal experiences, they include elements connecting them within a larger collective popular culture. Inspired by the crumbling wonders of classical ruins, each piece is somehow incomplete; drawings are unfinished and structural elements left exposed. These life-sized fragments are painstakingly reconstructed from family photos, archival images, and my own memories. Titled after the Capriccio genre of painting in which archeological ruins were placed in fictional and often fantastical combinations, these fragments stand as embodiments of a tangible constructed past. Much as classical ruins reflect an irretrievable halcyon era, these sculptures create a sense of unattainable reality, a futile recreation of a seemingly perfect past.  The stereotypical Midwestern American world fades but may never have truly existed at all.