Donald Lipski, an American artist born in 1947, explores how context transforms the meaning of ready-made objects through whimsical combinations of materials and site. His approach is mainly conceptual, expressing ideas through the flaked rust of his chosen material while inviting viewers to speculate through their own associations. Ball? Ball! Wall? Wall!, created in 1994, is a 300-foot-long sculpture in which Minimalism's simplicity of form collides with Surrealism's shifts of scale and object placement in an unexpected landscape. It draws on the humor and irony often found in Surrealism by treating examples of monumental industrial production as if they were much smaller consumer products. Resembling a row of soccer balls, an office desktop toy, or a pearl necklace, the work is made from recycled steel ocean buoys, each five feet in diameter and weighing 650 pounds. This once sea-worthy but now land-locked reclamation project reflects Lipski's interest in combining what he calls "stuff" and, in his act of reassembling the world, uses the collision between beached marine forms and their associations with smaller objects to think through the inner world of play and the outer world of reality.
