“I’m interested in tapping into the potential for life in all things. I call a work of art finished when I sense that it’s just a breath away from being alive.”
—Willie Cole

Among his earliest assemblages of domestic consumer items, Willie Cole’s series of ‘wind masks’ and ‘air masks’ present animated, exaggerated visages through the form of hair dryers. Hair dryers as a medium first came to Cole when he encountered a large cache of the domestic appliances in a deserted warehouse near his Newark loft. In the beginning, the artist used them abstractly, piling them up for a 1989 installation entitled Hugo, named for the devastating Category 4 hurricane of the same year. Soon, however, Cole began to disassemble – then reassemble – the pile, reusing the dryers for his air masks and related works. In angling, arranging and connecting the hair dryers, figurative configurations began to appear, with complex expressiveness akin to that of carved masks from Africa or the Pacific. As Cole described, “I see an object and suddenly I recognize what I can do with the object. So in that sense there is an energy or spirit connection to the object. I am exploring the possibilities of these objects.”

[Left]: Senufo, Mask (Kpeliye'e). Brooklyn Museum, New York. Image: Brooklyn Museum, Museum Expedition 1922, Robert B. Woodward Memorial Fund, 22.1586.
[Right]: Probably Umboi or Siassi Islands, Mask, 19^th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1972, 1978.412.721.

The horned, broadly smiling, and big-eyed head of Merit 1000 ™ Airmask demonstrates Cole’s propensity for animating everyday objects – both through calling attention to the elements of wind and heat that are at the core of a hair dryer’s function, and by transforming these discarded devices into a ceremonial object, augmented by the fur-covered dryers at the top of the masks head which impart an animalistic quality. As Cole described, “when I worked with hairdryers, everything I made had the ability to function shamanistically in the real world. I made masks, like helmet masks, for real use in ceremonies that didn’t exist […] It was awareness that before there was art and commerce, before there was the word ‘art,’ people were making objects to be used. These objects over time became the vessels of the community’s spirit and the depository for the community’s history.”
- Exhibited
  The Newark Museum, Willie Cole: See No Evil, 1992
  Ridgefield, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Promising Suspects, October 2, 1994 - Janaury 8, 1995