Jose Resende (b. 1945)

A process artist, Resende has shown tremendous and creative facility with disparate materials both hard and soft, from industrial metals to wax, hide, and fabric. Here, he overlays the edges of a sand dollar with paraffin and pierces it with loops of copper wire, threaded in and out of the rounded, skeletal body. Fragile and suggestively erotic, the assemblage recalls Man Ray’s film L’Étoile de mer (1928) and the surrealist sculpture of Maria Martins, whose influence Resende has acknowledged.