Peter Shelton’s sculptures deftly toe the line between figuration and abstraction, between an interest in sculptural materials and an interest in organic form, and between a love of the human figure and a love of form for its own sake. Animated yet inert, referential yet abstracted, robust yet ethereal, easily read yet mysterious, Shelton’s sculptures are filled with contradictions that infuse the work with many levels of interest, visual, physical, and psychological. This richness precludes his work from being categorized in terms of any one movement or “ism,” be it postminimalism, postmodernism, conceptual art, or anything else. Instead, Shelton’s is a body of work that demands to be considered on its own terms, considered both historically and ahistorically, both in the context of and outside Western art and culture.
Nightymonster is a fluid, vertical presence, with its swelling belly and extremely long skirt. The comforting connotations of the word “nighty” and the maternal overtones implied by the pregnant figure contract with the fearsome, looming, black metallic presence of the eleven-foot-tall sculpture. The exoskeletal grid pattern of the nighty resembles chain mail, weighing heavily on the outsized yet narrow-shouldered figure. An imagined monster of the night is, of course, a nightmare. Shelton has long been interested in dreams and has created characters like nightymonster that could inhabit just such a dream world.