Charlotte Jackson Fine Art is pleased to present a group exhibition of metalwork sculpture, Metal Mash Up. The show will run from July 5 – August 3, with an Opening reception on Friday, July 5 from 5-7 p.m. The gallery is located in the Railyard Arts District at 554 South Guadalupe Street.
Summer is heat and space and light. Summer is color. Summer is bold. Summer is perfect for sculpture. This summer, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art is excited to revive its themed group sculpture exhibition: Metal Mashup. A group exhibition is always a way to set up room for comparison and contemplation. The unique perspectives of different artists allow a viewer to relate to pieces in a whole new way. Metal Mash Up, playing on the idea of a mash up in music or literature, features three talented artists whose metalworks offer a wide variety of forms, formats, approaches, fabrications, and colors: Pard Morrison, Elliot Norquist, and Jeremy Thomas. This diverse range of metalworks offers the chance to explore nuance, detail, and difference in ways that a single-artist show wouldn’t allow.
The first thing you see, entering the gallery, may be Pard Morrison’s large freestanding aluminum columns. These pieces are a bit larger than human scale – ranging from 6.5 to 12 feet tall and 1.5 to 2.5 feet wide. Covered in softly vivid blocks of woven colors, they are brush painted, contrary to what one might expect with metal sculpture of this size, using special industrial paints that offer a vast catalog of color options. On very close inspection, you can see the hand of the artist in the brushwork on the surfaces. Morrison weaves strips of colors together across the horizontal and vertical planes in varied patterns. Where the colors meet, lines sometimes disappear or overlap, or sometimes merge, morphing into different hues. These complex, interlaced and unexpectedly connected colors prove to be both thoughtful and mesmeric.
Turning to Elliot Norquist’s steel wall pieces and found object work, we find a shift in perspective, as well as in volume. These works perfectly balance the elegance and humor we’ve come to expect from Norquist’s work. Here the spare folded steel shapes of works from his Folded series (based on the intriguing shapes of folded paper scraps), with their spare colors, somehow seamlessly compliment the unusual Found Object – an industrial gear or wheel, painted green and set into a custom made metal stand. The Folded pieces play with new color tones and combinations, while the more anomalous Found Object references earlier site specific work, while still playing with new colors.
Also playing with a whole new range and use of color is Jeremy Thomas, who brings his familiar inflated steel forms to the exhibition. His complex, multi-form pieces, including both wall-mounting and floor sculptures, are given a whole different aspect through a new approach to the utilization of color inspired by the colorwork of his recent inflated canvas pieces. Rather than using one or two of his signature bold, slick color choices and patinaed planes to coat and contrast, with his new pieces Thomas “pushes or pulls” the color in ways that highlight or thwart the angles and planes of the forms. The color combinations can be surprising – with flared out colors and subtly merging tonalities created using airbrushing. While Thomas’ inflated pieces are a way to visually record the effects of atmosphere and pressure (air pushing against form in ways that will always be unique to the moment) his changing use of color realigns us in relationship to our expectations. We must look again.
A walk through the gallery is a walk through a landscape of strange forms, dazzling colors, and quite a few wonders. Each piece in Metal Mash Up has its own story, it’s unique vocabulary of form, material, color, theory. Together they create something new, an experience that gives the viewer a new context within which to explore the possibilities of metal sculpture.
– Michaela Kahn, Ph.D.
