Label Text:
Life and death, safety and destruction—all are invoked by this complex work. Its form references a soldier’s helmet, while simultaneously suggesting an atomic mushroom cloud, the protective nature of a turtle’s shell, the mysterious structure of a jellyfish, and innumerable other images. Due to this ambiguity, and the power that an object holds when it is unfamiliar to the human mind, this sculpture begins to resemble a sentient being for the viewer who engages with it for an extended period of time. It commands one to walk around and peer beneath it in a (perhaps futile) attempt to know it completely. Hadzi, a son of Greek immigrant parents and a member of the United States Air Force during World War II, was heavily influenced by war and mythology.

-Charlotte Young (Class of 2017), University of Massachusetts Amherst
A Very Long Engagement: Nineteenth-Century Sculpture and Its Afterlives (July 29, 2017 - May 27, 2018)

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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=MH+1979.7

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