George Stoll, hailing from the heart of the “Baltimore bad taste Renaissance,” that so-called “tinsel world of trash,” has, over the past thirty-or-so years, engaged in a process of making often hailed as clement, humorous, and fragile. His works bask in their own blissful pastime, which has entailed the precision-craft of noticing, and so engaging, the spiritual lives of certain minor items. Culled from the rush of life’s relay into the calmness of the studio space, his sculptural works ask us to consider the serpentine stillness of party leftovers; the mundane beauty of Tupperware cups; and the patterns and textures that fix memories to mind. As fragments of being’s boring elation, or forms pointing to inner life (per the life inside, at home, in hotels, or rec rooms): these sculptures imagine the festive occasions that come to pass, time passing, and pastimes, in the simple act of resemblance: sculptures that look like stuff left lingering. Trash, tokens, remainders; not silver-misted as memorial objects, but as keepsakes go: things that promise to continue to contain the moment. Like so, Stoll partakes in his hometown’s triumphant tinsel world—and, transposes it to Tinseltown—but also sees the delicate potential in his chosen subject. Sponges, streamers, and cups come to contain the atmosphere of home. As Bachelard would have it, “A nest—we understand right away—is a precarious thing, and yet it sets us to daydreaming of security.” To be clear, Stoll is definitely a nester. What matters is less the specifics of any single event, but what these days occasion as universal grounds. Stoll’s hallmark is the holiday spirit, as what gives art its ceremonial edge. His works decorate a space beset between the all-encompassing and the individual: two spaces that seem cyclically connected. Like calendar dates and chores, one tends to lead to the other, and vice versa. Holidays, as it were, always come around again. Not past reflection (per nostalgia); rather, presence, continuity, contact. George tells me, in conversation, that his chosen objects are one’s commonly shared in the world. Ordinary things, things with some kind of use-value, even as surplus; things that we can all place, and that place us somewhere; things that we accrue, but rarely truly consider—especially in the aftermath of their raison d’être. Sponges, cartoon-ish bones, toilet paper. Stoll crafts stuff that we can all relate to, in order, then, to contemplate the relation. Or, perhaps more simply, bear witness to it. His sculptures halt something of life’s relay, in collecting tokens from the drift, which act as temporal markers, pointing to parties and their aftermath; to dishes served up in plastic containers, and the stuff we used to clean them up; to stuff noticed, and forgotten. Beauty lies in the conflation of categories: the lack of distinction between the eventful and the uneventful, the holiday and the working day, or the mundane or sublimated. In other words, the works’ essence is laid bare in the simplicity of process. ~exerpt from the text by Sabrina Tarasoff