18”h x 24”w framed 23”h x 29”w x 1.5”d

Click image to enlarge.

MONKEY BUSINESS was to be a fairly traditional still life, utilizing various vintage objects. However, as Rob started to choose and arrange the objects they started to tell their own story.

The monkeys and the manikins all represent various aspects of our personality: some happy-go-lucky, some feeling trapped in the gears of life, some feeling sad and hurt, some helping and comforting, some meditative, some could give a hoot. We all try to balance these aspects of our self to find love and happiness, represented by the rose carefully held by the clamp. The crates can be seen as the boxed mental constructs we impose on our life, and the fragments of smiling faces as the joys and temptations from which we try to piece together an ideal whole.

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