Art

ARTICLE: Chiseled from wood, Aleph Geddis’ spindly, playful, vaguely alien wooden sculptures evoke an enigmatic tension between identity and glyph. His organic, hand-worked objects teeter between abstraction and figuration like retrofuturistic icons. The artist lives between Japan, Bali, and Orcas Island in Washington. “This split has been incredibly generative, allowing me to carry my practice with me and respond to very different environments and energies,” he tells Colossal.

Scale is a constant source of fascination. Geddis has recently been working on a series he calls Littles, which are “inspired by the way children disappear into dreamy, imaginative worlds while playing with toys,” he says. “They feel personal and secretive, almost like talismans.”

On the larger side, Geddis is lately considering how pieces may transform into site-specific responses to environments. He’s also currently working on a large-scale project for the Burning Man festival amid Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, which people will be able to walk through. “I love the idea of these forms existing in the clean, open environment of the playa, where they can be experienced at a completely different scale and in relation to the vast desert landscape.”