This recent holiday vacation, I made a trip with my wife to Nashville, TN to visit my mother. We had a couple of days to kill, so we decided to go to Nashville’s First Center for the Visual Arts to spend a few hours. The show that blew me away was Bob Trotman’s Model Citizens which will be running through February 11, 2007. The show consists of approximately six sculptures, all carved from wood. There are several amazing features of his sculpture. A more striking feature is his ability to walk a fine line between creating realistic figures yet still letting the characteristic of the wood, in all its cracks and fissures, come through. The wood’s defects attempt to inform the viewer of the character’s current mental state, so the wood becomes emotion in a literal and figurative sense. It’s deep stuff. And I haven’t even touched on the removable parts of the face… but I’ll leave that for your exploration.