In 1970, just out of graduate school, Stephen Laub embarked on a series of performance pieces that explored the relationship between objects -- in this case his face -- and images drawn from both deeply personal as well as historical contexts.
For the first of those, "Relations," he projected images from his family's photo albums on a wall and, dressed entirely in white and using two small mirrors, fit his body into each image. Because his clothing was as white as the wall, only his face emerged from the bodies of his father, his mother, even what appears to be a family dog.
"I was reading a lot of R.D. Laing at the time," he said during a conversation in his Water Mill studio, "and he was talking about the family. I was really influenced obviously by my family and I thought he was saying we are part of what we see. . . . Then I thought about their images and being part of their images. Which I am, in the sense people say, 'you look like your aunt.' "
He added that it was like time travel. One image was his parents on their wedding day in 1933, another his mother holding him in the early '50s. "It was very simple, pre-computer. You could go back to the moment in time. It was a visual connection and a personal connection."
A series of works followed. In one, "Making History," he inserted himself into images from his childhood and youth, including his ID as a student at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris in 1965. In another, "Perfect Strangers," he chose to "enter" slides taken from photo albums purchased at a flea market.
Indeed, the relationship between objects and history is a thread that runs through his work. "I've always had that idea of connecting history in some way."
In two other series, "Untitled (Gold)" and "Untitled (Silver)," from 1988 and 1989 respectively, he created sculptures in which he embedded small newspaper photographs from the run-up to World War II, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and the civil rights movement.
In all of those there is a connection between the images and the objects, which he makes from bending plywood, a material made in Italy. One from the "Gold" series is in the shape of a water fountain, which is embedded with a small black-and-white photograph of a double water fountain labeled "colored" and "white."
Looking closely at a gold book-shaped sculpture reveals a photograph of young Germans burning books. A photograph of Hitler giving a speech is embedded in a gold lectern.
A hat -- a shape that recurs throughout his work -- from the "Silver" series contains a color photograph of Neville Chamberlain holding up his hat while riding in a car beneath a display of Nazi flags.
The object-photograph connection continues in his current series-in-progress, which was inspired by a recent visit to his studio by Robert Wilson, the founder of the Watermill Center. Mr. Laub had a range of his work on the walls, but it was a piece from 1990 that was lying on the floor that caught Mr. Wilson's eye. "I want that," he said, much to Mr. Laub's surprise.
Like that earlier work, the wall-mounted sculptures in the current series resemble crumpled sheets of paper painstakingly assembled from small irregular shapes of a material of his own invention. "It's like a rough draft," he said. "You sketch something, and that doesn't work, so you throw it away."
The photographs in this series are not visible; they are affixed to the back of each piece. One such is a photograph of a draft of a document from the Wannsee Conference where, in January 1942, Nazi party and government officials gathered to discuss the implementation of the "Final Solution." The paper, which Mr. Laub said was a "rough draft idea" for the Germans, listed every country in the world and how many Jews were estimated to live in each.
Another from the new series is based on the Bordereau, an 1894 document from the Dreyfus Affair trials that was torn up, taped back together, and used to falsely incriminate Dreyfus as a spy. The wooden bars Mr. Laub has attached to the front of the crumpled piece reflect the paths of the tape originally used to reassemble the document.
Of the current series, he said, "It's still a rough draft of an idea. I'm giving myself a problem, and I have to solve it at the same time. It's more interesting when I don't know what I'm doing than when I know what I'm doing."
It's not surprising that his family and world history are so entwined in his work. His parents were refugees who escaped from Germany in 1941 and came to the United States with $5. The other relatives lucky enough to survive and escape -- many didn't -- settled in Oakland, where one of Mr. Laub's uncles was a physician.
While in high school there, Mr. Laub would take the bus to Berkeley on the weekends, go to bookstores, and hang out on the campus. He enrolled in the architecture school at Berkeley in 1962 but dropped out after two years and wound up in Paris, where he attended the Ecole du Louvre and studied mime with Etienne Decroux, the founder of corporeal mime. Mr. Laub acknowledged its influence on some of his performance work.
He eventually realized he missed drawing and painting and returned to Berkeley, where he earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in sculpture. Among those teachers who influenced him was David Hockney.
"He was very smart," said Mr. Laub. At that point in time Hockney was so unknown that his painting "A Bigger Splash" was selling for $1,200 in a show on campus. It is now in the collection of Tate Britain.
Like many Bay Area artists, Mr. Laub moved to New York City in 1977. Two years later, when he had a little money saved, a cousin with a house in Water Mill suggested he buy some land and build a house. "I had never come out here before," he said. "If my cousin had lived upstate, I might have bought up there."
He purchased property on Head of Pond Road in 1979, in part because it overlooked potato fields and "it was a backwoods road, there was no traffic." Lacking the means to build, he remained in New York and met the artist Claire Watson in 1983. They married in 1990, the same year he was able to start the house.
"We moved in around 1996, and even then it was two-by-fours, one toilet, and a hot plate." While architects designed the exterior and a contractor built the shell, Mr. Laub did all the interior work, including plumbing, electrical work, and cabinetry. "Gradually my view disappeared, now it's a highway, and I can't get out of my driveway -- but everybody here has a similar story."
While hats figured in his sculptures with photographs, since 2000 he has produced no fewer than six series devoted to them. There is a personal connection: "My father never went out without a hat." In addition, he has always been intrigued by the form because "it is kind of sculptural, this round thing with a cylinder on it."
All of his hats are made from bending plywood. "Hats and Crowds" (2000-2005) consists of hats of different shapes covered in gold leaf, each with a band made of strips of movie film depicting crowd scenes. For the most recent hats, he covers the plywood with mud, then tops the mud with gold leaf.
Other recent pieces are combinations of several hats that suggest a hat being thrown into the air in celebration. Not surprisingly, some of those combinations use the Axis and Allied colors from World War II.
