Broken presents Bay Area assemblage artist Clint Imboden’s most recent body of work.
This new series builds upon Imboden’s interest in repurposing flea market finds, now moving beyond the assembly of free-standing sculptures to completely re-imagined final objects. Broken showcases items that have been fragmented and reassembled into new objects with no function. The original form and use of each item however, is still recognizable in its new, useless, state: crutches broken in half seem to have been repaired by someone without any understanding of their original use, hammers are fused together to create a two-headed oddity, and much more.
Broken confronts viewers with a collection of instruments that can easily be described as “worthless,” which poses the question: Are worth and value defined by functionality?
In drawing sharp focus to each item’s initial purpose by compromising that purpose, Imboden challenges visitors to consider what it is to be “broken” and how these objects reaffirm or defy that.
