page_title: Styrobot
section_title: Interpretations
hierarchical_section_title: Styrobot / Interpretations
caption_attribution_description: English: The installation "too much" by Michael Salter, giant styrobot seen from outside the glass wall of the gallery. Solo exhibition at Rice University Art Gallery, 6 November - 14 December 2008.
context_page_description: Styrobot is the name applied to a number of site-specific sculptural assemblages created by the artist Michael Salter. Robotic figures puzzled together from discarded polystyrene packing forms, Styrobots have risen ceiling-high to dominate their space. Although Styrobots are often intimidating in size, their postures are generally non-threatening, at times meditative.
context_section_description: In his review of Salter's 2008 show at the Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York, critic Edward Leffingwell characterized the massive Styrobot as demonstrating the notion that the artist "seems to toy with the replicable quality of a culture represented by freshly designed or appropriated images." "It more or less dominated the space," Bailey said. Curator David Brown has written that "the Styrobots are dazzling in their splendor, ambitious in their realization, and serve evidence to the artist's expansive interest in the bombardment of images that we suffer." For Salter's 2009 installation If You Don't Buy It From Us, It's Not Our Problem, think.21 Gallery in Brussels proposed the figure of the Styrobot as:
  "commenting on waste, the re-use of discarded material, and our uneasy relationship technology. The object itself can appear intriguing and beautiful. At first it appears to be a friendly machine, yet after close inspection it nevertheless reveals a much alarming reality. The polystyrene robot becomes a fearsome symbol of human consuming folly that is set to destroy mankind."
caption: too much installation at the Rice University Art Gallery, 2008
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