John Buck
March 11 - April 5, 2003

John Buck's direct carved wood sculpture, wood reliefs, woodblock prints, and woodblock rubbings form a unique body of work that combines sculpture, painting, drawing, and printmaking. Buck's art engages the viewer through its pure physicality and an elusive symbolism incorporating a sophisticated yet instinctive juxtaposition of figures and objects. This exhibition of recent work is his second show at DC Moore Gallery.

Uncharacteristically for a contemporary artist, John Buck has focused on direct wood- carving, in a variety of guises, as his medium. In Buck's hands the age-old activity of working with wood is continually reinvented and made fresh. Buck not only carves the wood, he also chips it, chisels it, gouges it, inks it, and makes rubbings from it. His wood of choice is jelutong -- a lightweight and resilient wood that allows him to work quickly and spontaneously.

Buck's work comes about largely through experimentation and improvisation. He is reluctant to assign precise meanings to his pieces, but one idea that he does stress is the concept of duality, which one finds throughout his work: in his free-standing sculptures -- some male, some female, with multiple symbolic elements on their headless shoulders; in his woodblock prints and rubbings -- from the hardness of the block and the fragility of the paper, to the differences in both process and result between pressing and rubbing.

The various universal and personal symbols that appear repeatedly in Buck's work become like building blocks or letters of an alphabet that can be combined and recombined to never give the same result twice.