Have you been to the sculpture garden lately, wondering where a particular orange deer might have gone?
Buck, by contemporary artist Michael Whiting, is currently on loan to the Denver Botanic Gardens through September 2018. The Denver Botanic Gardens is showing an entire exhibition of Whiting's sculptures entitled Pixelated: Sculpture by Mike Whiting. Mike Whiting created the sculpture in 2007. It came to the BYU Museum of Art in 2012 for the exhibition Michael Whiting: 8-Bit Modern. Following the close of the exhibition, the MOA acquired Buck and it has lived peacefully in the grove of trees on the west side of the MOA Sculpture Garden. Artist Michael Whiting described his process of creating these sculptures: “My current work explores this connection between early pixel-based video game images. I limit my image making to the same constraints that governed early pixel based technologies. I use a minimal number of squares to create an image. The images are formed into shaped steel canvases and are constructed using materials and techniques traditionally used to build minimalist sculpture. Unlike the minimalist art objects, my objects are image-based and lack a perfect finish. The paint appearance acknowledges the history of ideas and movements that preceded these objects, but also distinguishes them from those same ideas and movements, resulting in a pixel-based abstraction.” Visit Pixelated: Sculpture by Mike Whiting at the Denver Botanic Gardens from now until September 23, 2018. If you happen to go the Denver Conservatory, find our little friend and let us know how it is doing by posting a picture using the hashtag #byumoainco