At the opening of Hamiltonian Gallery’s Private Practice exhibition in June of 2010, a showcase of all the gallery’s fellows, there’s no debate over what the conversation piece of the evening is. Called Dream Machine, this dark, jagged mass put together by sculptor Michael Enn Sirvet seems to be the stuff of nightmares. Made of individually burned, blackened pieces of wood assembled around a junked metal hatch found in what Sirvet describes as a “miasmic, industrial hell-hole,” the piece is his response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a geyser still uncontained at the time of the opening.
The sculpture is unrecognizable as Sirvet’s. Most of the work in his portfolio is bright and elegant, and the thousands of small holes he drills into aluminum and other materials give even his largest pieces the appearance that a strong wind could sweep them away. Dream Machine, on the other hand, looks like it could sink through dried asphalt.
The contrast is not an accident. In preparation for Private Practice, curator David Page challenged fellows to create pieces outside of their accustomed styles. Sirvet was initially resistant, reasoning that he makes his living by producing a certain aesthetic, and to spend hundreds of hours creating a piece that deviated from his norm could be a costly waste of time. But when the Gulf spill began two months before the show’s opening, Sirvet found the inspiration he needed, whether he had been looking for it or not.
“I don’t have any real connection to the Mississippi Delta,” Sirvet says. “But to be around me for those months you would have thought my family lived down there and I’d come from a long line of Gulf shrimpers or something like that. I was impossible to be around; I was such a brooding, dark, pain-in-the-ass artist.” Channeling his emotion into this 250-pound behemoth of a sculpture eventually had people around Sirvet concerned—the gallery director at Hamiltonian asked him to change the language in his written statement for the show because it wasn’t fit for print, and other dealers who represent him needed to be reassured that this wasn’t a permanent new direction.
But Dream Machine may not be as far from Sirvet’s typical work as it would initially seem. While he admits that his objective in his work is primarily aesthetic, the theme that he continually returns to is the ironic and sometimes contentious juxtaposition of industrialization and nature, the patterns of holes he drills so precisely into metal representing the haphazard decay of nature, like the work of so many termites. “For me there’s a struggle,” he says. “Industry, technology, the love of it, the hate of it.” He looks around the small industrial park in Beltsville, Md. where he rents his studio. “I see the trees get knocked down more and more every year ... It sucks, but also I’m here using this space. I’m part of the problem too. It creeps into my work.”
Sirvet grew up in northeastern New Jersey. Originally earning a “practical” degree in finance in 1989, he passed up the opportunity to make a fortune on Wall Street and eventually went back to school to learn structural engineering at the University of Maryland. While art had been an interest for much of his life, it was only after several years of working for an engineering firm that he gave in to his passion for building “big useless things,” eventually earning enough as an artist to quit the day job and devote himself to sculpture.
One of Sirvet’s most recent projects can be seen at the Farragut West Metro station, where he brightened up the 17th Street entrance with 20 aluminum dishes mounted on the walls and illuminated from behind by custom-made LED lights. Other notable projects include a large Maltese cross at the US Embassy in Malta, and a table designed for Michael Jordan consisting of 32,292 holes, one for each point the NBA superstar scored. Although Sirvet has returned to his usual aesthetic, he does plan on building more dream machines in the future, even entertaining the idea (planted in his head by a studio neighbor) that one of them may one day be featured in a video game such as World of Warcraft or Myst—for which he says he’d gladly give the license for free.
Michael Enn Sirvet’s work has been displayed at Hamiltonian Gallery, Artisphere, and Gallery Plan B, among others. He will be showing new design and sculpture work with Adlon Design in Georgetown in February. The dedication ceremony for his Metro installation is also expected to take place at the end of February.
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