Layer Upon Layer
Layer Upon Layer brings together the work of father and son, Steve and Colin Sherrell, in a dialogue across generations, media, materials and ideas.
Steve’s paintings and digital works, such as Say What, probe the textures of language and image in a mediated world. His work layers painterly tradition with digital disruption, text with abstraction, humor with critique—each piece oscillating between the constructed and the spontaneous.
Colin’s sculptures extend that dialogue into three dimensions, building a body of forms that reimagine everyday objects, foods, and self-portraits through 3D modeling and fabrication. Butter sticks, grapes, garbage bags, dogs, and moons are recast as surreal protagonists—sometimes humorous, sometimes uncanny, always vibrating between the physical and the conceptual. Materials are layered as well: plastics meet paint, surface meets volume, and digital code meets sculptural mass.
Together, Steve and Colin explore how layers—of paint, pixels, plastic, meaning, and memory—build worlds. Layer Upon Layer is not only a generational conversation but also a meditation on how art continues to reinvent itself across traditions and technologies, fathers and sons, hand and machine.
Colin Sherrell on Layer Upon Layer
In Layer Upon Layer I approach sculpture as a place where tradition and technology overlap and collide. This work begins with the most ordinary forms—a stick of butter, a piece of fruit, a pill, a dog—and remakes them through digital modeling, 3D scanning, 3D printing, and painterly surfaces. These objects become stand-ins for self, memory, and culture: humorous, uncanny, and layered with metaphor.
The process is as important as the object. CAD software, AI image generation, failed prints, resin, plastics, and paint all find their way into my pieces. They carry with them the duality of the handmade and the machine-made, the natural and the artificial, the past and the present.
At times, the works are direct self-portraits (On the Grid, Milk Man, and Moon Man), while at others they echo cultural icons (Rotten, Royal, and Blueregard). Some celebrate absurdity (Meat Man, Yam I Am), while others press into fragility, loss, or longing (Trashy, Drug Me). Across them all, I aim to balance humor with weight, play with presence, and abstraction with recognition.
Ultimately, my sculptures can be songs of material and form—layered worlds in which digital grids, pixelated bodies, and familiar objects carry forward a deeply human voice.
Colin Sherrell
colinsherrell.com
