Rich Entel is an artist/physician living in Portland, Maine who's current sculpture installation "Rich Entel's Cardboard Menagerie" has been described as "mysterious, powerful, totemic, (and) full of surprises." This menagerie of nine animal-inspired sculptures is an intricate fusion of discarded cardboard, musical instrument fragments, and a skin of Tibetan text and Hebrew. Each wall-mounted sculpture morphs in form and emotion as the viewer moves. At the menagerie's center stands a diminutive figure made of amber wax and cardboard that rotates slowly, conducting with her wand.
Roots of the Menagerie reach back to Entel's experiences in the surge of homelessness and the baffling onslaught of AIDS in the early 1980s. As an artist and medical student in NYC at that time, street refuse became his primary art material--primarily cardboard, broken furniture, house paint, and tar. "Cardboard Menagerie" was created in conversation with indigenous art objects--primarily African, Tibetan, and North-West Indian, taking inspiration from their fracturing, reorganization, and transformation of form, and their evolved portrayal of "fierceness" and "wildness". In this Menagerie, cardboard and broken instruments meld together to give voice to the discarded.
Along with continuous exploration in art, Entel is a family physician in Maine with a focus in addiction medicine.
