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FLOATERS: They are what they are, artist Dan Lucal explains. (Photos by Ian Byers-Gamber) Hdpe Belt Conveyor Roller
Materials include polystyrene, steel and rubber tubing, foam roller and Plexiglas and packing tape.
Two waterborne sculptures by Rutgers University graduate art student Dan Lucal were installed in the Rutgers Marine Field Station boat basin in Tuckerton on Saturday, May 11.
Originally from Brookline, Mass., the Highland Park artist is currently enrolled in Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of Art masters of fine art program, where he is both a student and a teacher.
His sculptures will remain in the water for up to a year. Each sculpture consists of a buoy-like object floating on the surface, moored to a cast concrete sculptural anchor piece resting on the seafloor. The “floaters,” as Lucal playfully calls them, are meticulously fabricated from salvaged materials: polystyrene, a curved section of 2-inch square galvanized steel tubing off an old boat trailer, sections of a foam roller for massaging sore muscles, salt bricks and Plexiglas the artist found in the trash, rubber tubing from a video dolly track, sheet metal from an aluminum folding table, and packing tape.
The floaters were exhibited in the first-year MFA show at the Mason Gross Galleries in New Brunswick in November 2023.
“They seemed a little lost in the white-cube gallery space,” Lucal noted. “I tested them in the Raritan River before the show, and they came alive in the water.
“I love the way the ocean takes its toll and leaves its patina on everything it touches,” he added. “I’m interested in seeing how these artworks will weather after months of exposure.”
His floaters came to anchor at the field station after Lucal reached out to Operations Manager Roland Hagan at RUMFS in search of a safe place to deploy the sculptures in the water for an extended duration, he explained – “a place where they would be safe from drunk jerks on Jet Skis,” he explained. “(Hagan) is amazing. I’m so grateful for his endless energy and enthusiasm and support. He seems to know how to do everything.”
The sculptural concrete anchor pieces were cast this spring to serve as mooring blocks for the floaters. They are squid-like and jellyfish-like in appearance but were cast inside familiar objects – one in a plastic trash can, the other in an upside-down traffic cone.
“Once they’re down in the water, they’re mostly invisible, covered in sand and mud,” he explained. “I put a lot of time and energy into making these anchors, and putting them underwater where no one can see them feels like an important contradiction: There’s a lot happening under the surface that goes unseen.
“I’m sure there’ll be millions of tiny life forms encountering these anchors in the boat basin. Something will grow on them. I’m hoping for barnacles.
The sculptures will bob in the boat basin behind the marine field station for a year, anchored to the seafloor.
“My artwork is big in the plankton scene right now.”
Check them out on the RUMFS dock cam at rumfs.marine.rutgers.edu/dock-cam/.
Lucal said he didn’t make the floaters to symbolize anything. “They are non-representational, so to speak. That is, I did not make them to reference a particular idea or thing. They’re not abstractions. For example, a car does not represent a car, it is a car. These artworks take the idea of existing as a thing, rather than a symbol, into confusing territory, because it is not exactly clear what they are.
“At the moment I don’t have a name for them besides ‘floaters,’ but maybe I’ll come up with a more precise term. Of course they have some similarity to buoys, or hunting decoys, or little robots. I am interested in things that are difficult to describe with words.”
Post-process speculation and analysis is all well and good, Lucal said, but “when I’m making them, I’m working intuitively with my favorite junk and not thinking about what they are going to mean.”
Putting them out in the world is, in a sense, sharing a piece of himself, but only to an extent.
“These sculptures are uttered in my voice, as it were.
“But I went and visited RUMFS with my mom today to show her the sculptures, and there were a couple of guys fishing in a skiff drifting by, and they don’t know who made these floaters. So there is an anonymity to them. They don’t reveal much.”
The commentary on his sculptures has been, well, artsy.
“One of my most elderly teachers said, ‘There’s got to be an easier way to make a buoy.’ My friend Ed said, ‘This is just an excuse to go fishing, isn’t it?’ I’ve gotten some other interesting feedback as well. In my final reviews this semester, we talked about needing to feel a sense of belonging, being an imposter, absurdity, the body, the hand. Someone wrote in my guestbook at RUMFS, ‘Never contemplated the beauty of a buoy,’ signed USCG.”
Lucal attributes his rather unconventional perspectives to having attended an alternative high school “with no classes or teachers or grades or requirements or tests.” There he explored videography, and later he discovered his interest in sculpture while working “at this eco-junk thrift shop in NYC called Big Reuse. I worked there five years and had a little studio up in the rafters, and at night I would make sculptures out of the junk.”
He considers his artistic style “always in development” and does not shy away from “the sweet pain of growing.”
Lucal is inspired by refuse and by environments both natural and artificial, he said. His creative process is “to squirrel away materials I find in the garbage or get secondhand. Sometimes I keep them for many years and then, when I need to make a sculpture, I start playing around and looking at all the junk I’ve collected. I can geek out on process, too. I get fixated and obsessive about making these objects, and usually it goes way off track, and I try to be adaptive and open to new directions my mistakes are pointing towards. I’m not an architect or an engineer, but I do like to make plans, and I like changing my plans and being flexible. Sometimes I get to the end of a project, and nothing went wrong, and the thing I made looks like the drawing, and I’m like, ‘whoa, total snore.’”
Having an art community is “very important to me,” he said. “I love seeing the same people all the time and being in a place where we can run into each other, and I love seeing what other people are working on, and it’s nice to be able to show people what I’m doing.
“Being a student and a teacher is really a sweet spot.”
Size-wise, he likes to stay within the dimensions of what he can physically move by himself. “Maybe eventually I’ll have a forklift,” he said. “Or one of those trucks with the crane on the back.”
Lucal earned his BFA “at the ripe old age of 33,” he said, at New York City’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He will graduate from Rutgers with his MFA in 2025 and plans to continue sculpting.
“I hope to find art programs that will give me adjunct teaching jobs for a few years until I have enough experience to apply for a more permanent position somewhere,” he said. “I’d like to hunker down in some cute town somewhere and have a yard and a shop/studio, make art and teach and be a part of an art school community.”
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