A reverent stillness permeates Peter Shelton’s recent sculptural installation Sixtyslippers, 1997. The work consists of sixty cast-iron cones of varying diameters suspended from the ceiling with wire cable, hovering roughly a quarter-inch above the floor in no particular pattern. The cones fill the gallery space while allowing the viewer to move around and through them.

Like many of his peers who began making sculptural installations in the ’80s, Shelton’s work combines Minimalism’s geometric reductions with post-Minimalism’s allusions to human and organic forms. There has also been a marked

Begin with the fact that beauty leaves you at a loss, fumbling for the life you had before you encountered it as if it were a key to something crucial. Alfred Jarry referred to it as “monster.” Richard Hawkins quotes him on his website: “It is conventional to call ‘monster’ any blending of dissonant elements; the Centaur and Chimera are defined this way to people who do not know them. I call ‘monster’ every original inexhaustible beauty.”

Hawkins’ ongoing project is to test the limits of originality and (seeming) inexhaustibility, limits that for him are partly embodied in certain examples of