A group exhibition will always be a balancing act – bringing together the works of several artists under the umbrella of a common thematic program, and exploring the dynamics of how these pieces will push and pull against and with each other. In Metal Mash Up, playing on the idea of a mash up in music or literature – bringing together various disparate works of often wildly different genres to create a new whole – we get an opportunity not only to explore a range of metalworks by eight masters of their materials – but the chance to dig into nuance, detail, and difference in ways that a single-artist show wouldn’t allow.
While all the artists here are workers in metal, their work also falls, if only academically, into the categories of Minimal or Reductive art, where the work of art itself, in its materiality, form, colors, textures, becomes the focus. This work cuts out choices: subject matter, representation, it reduces decisions about color (most of these works are either monochrome or bichromatic) and often about shape and proportion. The information offered to the viewer by the artist, through the work itself, is minimal, paired back. And yet here in Metal Mash Up it is clear to see the amazing variety that still exists under this reductive category. These contrasts bring into relief an elegant austerity against the wild and sweeping inventiveness that humans are capable of achieving.
Constance DeJong marries paradoxical worlds within her wall-mounted copper pieces. Here mathematical formula and exacting precision determine the forms, while DeJong invites chaos into the play of her chemical patina process. The warm glow of the copper beneath the smokey black patina forms an echo or light-reflection on the wall behind, where the raw copper edges and backs show through. Michael Post’s metal ellipses both complement and contrast with DeJong’s. The metal discs, mounted at an angle to the wall so that they seem to hover, present matte smooth-colored surfaces to the eye: monochrome – whether black or color (aqua, red) – but behind them floats an ambient halo of color: neon green, lemon yellow, citrus-soda orange. While the affect is similar to DeJong’s copper light-shadows, here they are achieved in precisely the opposite way – material artifice versus the lambent property of the material itself.
Heiner Thiel’s arced, anodized aluminum pieces present another permutation of this theme. Here the pieces arc out from the wall, shards of a much larger imaginary sphere. While DeJong and Post’s works reflect color behind themselves to the wall – Thiel’s creates an effect of shadow and color within the concave surface. The movement of light within the curve changes the eye’s perception of color and creates almost the effect of a hovering or shimmering of color.
Thiel’s bright colors speak, in turn, to Jeremy Thomas’ lushly vivid, complex-formed cold-forged steel sculptures. These finned and bulbed and dimpled pieces somehow manage to look as if they are newly evolving organic creatures being born from the chemical-slick of high civilization (paradox again).
Roy Thurston’s aluminum wall panel works, with their gently finessed folds and their finely etched and scraped surfaces in turn harken back to Thiel and Post in the precision of their format. The ever so fine bowing fold in the panel allows for activation of light across the textural surfaces. The affect here is of movement. If light is being used behind and within the works of Thiel, Post, and DeJong – here it is brought back to the surface.
The subtlety of Thurston’s work presents a complement to Elliot Norquist’s understated Folded Corner painted aluminum work – with its contrast of white and natural metal coloring, inverted triangle and the lighthearted way that the fabricated Phillips flathead screws are made part of the artwork itself. The inherent humor in Norquist’s work in turn speaks to Pard Morrison’s bright and multi-colored works of puzzle-like cubes painted on metal, with their outrageous and provoking titles, like Bad Tempered Prom Queen. Morrison’s complex color patterns trick the mind into seeking repetition, order – and instead refuse to fully complete the pattern, to confuse the expectation.
And finally, we come full circle to Tom Waldron’s weighty, graceful, steel geometries. These pieces eschew color for a more naturalistic rust/black patina – but here the confusion of expectation comes through the forms. With gentle curving lines and soft bulging sides, these works skew the anticipation of perfect, rigid geometric forms: the cube twists and topples, the cone billows like a sail.
Each piece in Metal Mash Up has its own story, it’s unique vocabulary of form, material, color, theory. Yet together they create something new – a conversation that serves to highlight and showcase each artist’s distinctive vision in context and conviviality to the rest.
