ART REVIEW: "JUGGERNAUT"
VISUAL ARTS BY JOANNE SILVER
THE BOSTON HAROLD 17 November 1995
SCULPTOR LEAVES HIS FOOTPRINTS ON THE ART WORLD
Standing beside his monumental sculpture, "Juggernaut" - a 680 - pound wooden wheel rimmed by 96 used army boots - Ken Hruby reaches up to touch the tread of one boot and finger the black lace of another. "Each one of these boots has a history," he says. "Mud. Cracks. Gum. The untied laces add an element of risk."
It is strange to hear this retired Army officer, with experiences in Korea's DMZ and the jungles of Vietnam, speak of the hazards of a loose shoelace. In the face of the monstrous wheel, perilously poised atop a wooden ramp, a stray lace seems insignificant. But the haunting power of Hruby's art comes from his ability to join wildly disparate perspectives, scales, materials and agendas.
If "Juggernaut" seems monolithic, it's exquisite woodworking evokes handcrafted beauty. As a group, the boots echo the tromp, tromp, tromp of soldiers marching. Individually, they tell stories of lives led and maybe lost.
The shoelaces form an elegiac pattern of strokes raining down from the weight of the wheel. Footprints and patterns give shape to Hruby's recent art and create the sense of a continuum. In his statement accompanying the Boston Sculptors at Chapel Gallery show (60 Highland St., West Newton), the artist writes, "Footprints define us, after all: they show clearly where we come from and less clearly the direction we will travel."
From his earliest training at West Point, Hruby saw meaning beyond the steps he was taught. His first year's class went from ball room dancing class to bayonet drill - an absurdity captured in the piece "Fix Bayonets, Let's Dance." Beneath two photographs - one of two cadets dancing the waltz, the other of a soldier practicing with a bayonet - Hruby has choreographed a circle of footsteps: wood parquet tiles, etched to indicate where the feet should move in a box step; and muddy clumps of cement, where heavy boots have left their impression. The cycle is continuous, the surrealistic dance unending.
Two worlds collide in "War Story," a cutaway of a real boot, which Hruby has lined with a silk-screened map of Vietnam's Central Highlands. This map is his story, the insides of his encounter with Vietnam, as personal - and as generic - as the boots he wore.