NEW Acquisition: Sean O'Meallie's "Monster Pencil Tip"

Sean O’Meallie, Monster Pencil Tip: An Endlessly Enlargeable Monument to Human Imagination, Interrupted – Pay No Attention to its Highly Suggestible Shape!, polychromed wood, 2005

We’ve seen Sean O’Meallie’s work in the 75^th Anniversary galleries before, with his 2009 work, The Last Piece. The Last Piece was a polychrome wood sculpture of heel piece of bread, which drew attention to our culture’s tableside obsession with the question, “who gets the last piece?” In Monster Pencil Tip, O’Meallie is applying his playful sculptural technique in a different way.

When you first look at it, it should appear to be what it is: a very VERY enlarged graphite pencil tip. But one cannot ignore the pencil tip’s obvious visual association, a warhead.

“I’ve been addressing ways of looking at differences for a long time by working out ways of embodying opposing and varied ideas within a single object or object group…Play is an important and useful tool in my world.”

We’re constantly switching out pieces from the permanent collection, so hopefully you can come down and see this before there’s comes another O’Meallie piece or something else!