Charles Tucker, currently the head of sculpture at the Cleveland Institute of Art, is an artist and researcher actively working toward an aesthetic research methodology, a goal that he has sought and investigated since the mid-1990s. Furthering this end he and noted critic and theorist, Saul Ostrow, are currently developing a rhetorical model for aesthetic investigation and cultural production. To date the work has been responsible for several collaborative productions most notably the rhetorical object and chief “analysis tool” the Aesthetic Compass.


“Much of my work has been focused on the structural connection within the component parts of the constructions I present. Significant is an aesthetic mapping of ultrathin boundaries that obscure and separate the relationships between our constructed human world and the real space that we inhabit. A constructed space predicated on understanding via the predictability of pattern and repetition laid out in simple dimensional space. When compared to the multidimensional reality of our world and an inability to understand our relationship within that space is revealed. This revelation makes clear a necessary struggle to reconcile understanding with reality. This struggle is, I believe, an aesthetic struggle. While the need for struggle is often recognized, it is rarely understood in this way because of our attraction to Style as a means of communication and its immediate value. Structural relationships often require more investigation and often when successful reveal analogous relationships whose synergies are not easy to recognize and even more difficult to fully understand. It is this elusive relationship that my investigation attempts to probe and it is arts ability to examine the poetic implications of non-linear space that I find most intriguing.”