“Dear Peter Parker, There are a few things I’d like to thank you for. First and foremost thank you for making a mask to cover your face. Thank you for making a suit to cover every inch of your skin. Because of this, I too can be Spider-Man without having to be the Asian Spider-Man or the Indian Spider-Man.”
We all have heroes to thank. But not many of us go to the lengths taken by artist Hetain Patel (TED Talk: Who am I? Think again) in a new sculpture that took him four months to construct. The piece, “Letter to Peter Parker,” is a life-size Spider-Man — actually a fiberglass cast of Patel — wearing a custom-made suit covered in hand drawn words. Take a closer look at the ultimate homage to a superhero:
From a distance, “Letter to Peter Parker” may seem relatively simple. But when you get up close, things get interesting. “The text repeats over and over and essentially thanks Peter Parker for all the reasons I used to relate to him as a kid,” says Hetain Patel. “He helped make me who I am today.”
Patel used fabric paint to create this work. Some of the other things for which he thanks Spider-Man: “Thank you for being skinny and wearing glasses. Thank you for being too shy to talk to girls. Thank you for being bullied and for having the shit knocked out of you.”
Why Spider-Man? “I just feel like he’s more vulnerable than a lot of other superheroes like Batman or Superman,” says Patel. “I think Marvel got it so right with Peter Parker/Spider-Man. He is essentially modeled on all the nerdy kids like me that read the comics.”
To create this work, Patel took his painted suit and stretched it over a fiberglass cast of his body. Later this year, he’ll take the suit off the sculpture and wear it in a performance called “American Boy.”
Patel’s Spider-Man sculpture sits in a squatted position, a body stance that echoes throughout his work. At the end of his TED Talk, for example, Patel folds from the waist and lowers his body to the ground. “I didn’t learn to sit like this through being Indian,” he says. “I learned it from Spider-Man.”
“Letter to Peter Parker” lurks in the corner of the Chatterjee & Lal gallery in India. It’s on view there through the end of February 2015 as part of Patel’s multimedia exhibition, “The Other Suit.”
See also this timelapse film of the making of “Letter to Peter Parker.”
