This project is based on three major twentieth-century American novels: Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) and Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays (1970) and Run, River (1963). Wellington artist Erica van Zon hand sculpted items mentioned in these books, including a gun, false teeth, orange peel, cigarettes, and a doughnut. Decontextualised, accompanied by coiled sequinned snakes, and presented on floor plinths, these sculptures read like clues scattered across a desert. The Light on the Dock typifies the themes of reinterpretation and rereading, humour and fakery, that have distinguished Van Zon’s work.
