Chas’ Stainless Steel, Mark Thompson’s Airplane Parts, About 1,000 Pounds of Stainless Steel Wire, and Gagosian’s Beverly Hills Space at MOCA, 2002
- Medium
- Stainless steel and airplane parts
- Dimensions
- 300 x 648 x 396 in. (762 x 1645.9 x 1005.8 cm)
- Accession Number
- 2002.2
- Copyright
© Nancy Rubins. Photo by Brian Guido
- Credit
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Purchase in honor of Beatrice Gersh with funds provided by the Acquisition and Collection Committee; The Broad Art Foundation; Linda and Bob Gersh; David, Susan, Steven, and Laura Gersh; and Eugenio Lopez
Rubins’s monumental sculpture brings together the disparate elements that comprise its title to create a work of extraordinary visual impact. Like a massive, otherworldly tree, the sculpture is anchored to the ground and rises upward along a central axis. As it climbs, branch-like appendages—wild juxtapositions of used airplane parts—spread and cantilever outward in various directions. Rubins is known for such large-scale arrangements of nontraditional sculptural materials; she has used camping trailers, televisions, and kayaks in other sculptures. Chas’ Stainless Steel . . . was installed in 2001 at MOCA Grand Avenue where it remained on view until 2019 when the massive work was disassembled, transported to Little Tokyo, and reassembled in front of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Here, it has a formidable companion in the nearby century-old Aoyama fig tree, which is designated as a LA historic-cultural monument.
