Auto Tower, Industrial Forms (part B) c. 1922

John Storrs's "Auto Tower, Industrial Forms (part B)" stands tall in painted plaster, reaching for some kind of architectural future. Imagine Storrs, around the time of the First World War, wrestling with this form. I see him carving, scraping, building up this tower, maybe in a cold studio in France, dreaming of the skyscrapers to come. There's a real tension here between the hand-made and the machine-made. Those layers of dark and pale tones create a rhythm, a visual pulse. The interplay of straight lines and curves, the sharp angles softened by those Art Deco arches – it’s a whole conversation about progress and modernity, and the artist's place in it all. It reminds me a bit of some of the Vorticist sculpture from around the same time, that same urge to capture the energy of the industrial age in abstract form. I imagine there was a lot of back and forth in making this, and that the piece came to be through a lot of trial and error. It’s that constant conversation across time and space that keeps art alive, doesn't it? We borrow, we steal, we riff off each other’s energy, and in the end, we create something new.