243.84h x 822.96w cm
The Page Bong Gallery is pleased to present Give: new work by Jaydan Moore & Sundial at Midnight: new paintings by Isa Newby Gagarin opening Friday, November 3 from 6 to 8 PM. The exhibition will run through November 25, 2017.
In Give, metalsmith Jaydan Moore gives new life to found tableware while highlighting the marks of previous use. From a family of tombstone workers, Moore developed an appreciation for heirlooms left behind and the craft of preserving memories. He is “motivated by how an object moves through the world, changing in meaning as it is passed down.” For his composite sculptures, Moore deconstructs and reassembles silver plate platters and other serving pieces, creating new patterns and shapes out of their smooth and decorative details. Scratches and tarnish from use and neglect are evident, while warped shapes, breakages, and uneven edges indicate Moore’s transformative reconstructive process. Platters also serve as printmaking plates, their surfaces disclosing marks of service. Preserved, bequeathed, discarded, or recast, these objects suggest how meaning accumulates over time.
Moore worked for the past three years as an Artist-in-Residence at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. Since graduating with an MFA and MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he has held various teaching and visiting artist positions in California and throughout the North and Southeast and was a Fountainhead Fellow at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2013. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and featured in Metalsmith and Craft Magazines.
In the side gallery, Isa Newby Gagarin’s abstract paintings also reference time. Born in Guam and raised in Hawaii, Gagarin developed from these contexts a “sense of the expansive scale of sky and ocean and an intuitive understanding of the rotation of the earth.” These sensations are suggested in Sundial in Shade which was inspired by such an object discovered in an overgrown courtyard at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. Gagarin invokes manmade and natural timepieces to suggest the cycles of nature and personal experience. Luminous color washes in fluid strokes contrast the rectangular forms they articulate. Shadowy grays and clear blues and greens balance the warm glow of orange and red, suggesting expanses of sky and sea viewed from the shore or through windows and other framing devices that mark space and time.
Gagarin is a visual artist based in Richmond, Virginia and is currently an MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been published in several artist books and exhibited in Minneapolis, where she earned a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She was also featured in group shows in Richmond, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Amsterdam.
