Steve Mazza
Out of Character (inaction figures)
by
Tor Lukasik-Foss
August, 2005

As consumers of Western media, we know that rabbits are never boring.  Immediately and instinctively we trust them as shepherds into hitherto unforeseen worlds: whether it be Peter Rabbit’s ill-advised foray into Mr. McGregor’s garden, any of Bugs Bunny’s manic detours, Alice’s descent into the psychedelic Wonderland, or Donnie Darko’s precarious tottering between both life and death, reality and madness.  Rabbits are always negotiating the transfer from innocence to experience, order to chaos, reason to imagination.

The reason Steve Mazza’s ceramic sculptures are instantly striking, shocking even in a way, is because his rabbits are as far away from imminent transformations or magical chaotic plunges as is possible.  They are rabbits devoured by the banalities of day to day living, corporate assimilation, boredom, melancholy, and sameness.  They are rabbits who have given up their former heroics in favour of the stability of nine to five white collar work.  They poo, sleep, dress, and grow listless, bored and lonely just like the rest of us.

Mazza has worked for the better part of the last year constructing this homogenous brood of sculptures, each rendered in clay to the same scale, with the same Caucasoid skin tone, the same single human ear, the same yearning blankness in the eyes, the same taste in clothes.  Undoubtedly the work to make them must have at times been as repetitive as the routines suggested by the figures; maybe that’s the point.  Works of imagination are not made from unfettered and heroic gusts of whimsy.  They are equally construed through diligence, craft, and constancy.

Are these figures then autobiographical? Are these descriptions of a melancholy-- of creative imagination barely able to get up and get dressed in the morning? Or are we to be reassured by these figures, by knowing that fantastical humanoid rabbits put their pants on one leg at a time just like us?  Are these works funny?  Tragic? Absurd?  Horrific?  Do we want to see so much of ourselves in the rabbit?

The only inevitability is that the rabbit is waiting for us.  And whether we want to or not, we always follow the rabbit.