Paul McCarthy: White Snow #3
Recently, I stopped by Hauser Wirth and stumbled upon this cutie pie in the courtyard — Paul McCarthy’s White Snow #3 (2012).
Bronze, yet giving the illusion of molten plastics, this piece struck me as a house fire — the charred remains of a childhood and a family, of youth and all the things we think growing up will be.
Seeing it, I expected to smell it, and I did but not with my nose. I smelled it somehow in my head — the ash and tar and singed dreams, the fairytales not forgotten but lost in the fire, the war of growing up and the realities of its frontline.
This installation stopped me in my tracks, speaking directly, loudly, to all I’ve lost between then and now, and to all the burned pieces I want back.
