Stephen Yusko

My studio is located in South St. Louis within a late
19th century brewery complex. It’s a beautiful industrial landscape—red brick buildings filled with systems of tunnels (there are three floors below ground in my building), pipes, chutes, pulleys and wires. Lots of history. On the roofs of several of these century-old brewery buildings, though, are cell phone signal-receiving towers, linked to climate-controlled rooms built to contain computers and
the latest tools of our contemporary information-technology-based, virtual society.

This landscape, with its anomalies and vernacular of utility, has a tremendous influence on the things that I make.  I combine my love of forging, forming and
fabricating steel with other materials to make sculptures
that reference the graceful beauty and simplicity in objects I’m surrounded by. The sculptures are machines or tools
or toys with an unspecified, yet familiar, purpose.  Containing complex construction within a simple form,
they are metaphors for us. Things enter, go through
various processes and then exit.