Gray Contemporary is pleased to announce two solo exhibitions, in the Main Gallery Deborah Dancy: Un/Natural Occurrence and in the Second Gallery Austin Turley: Correspondence. Both exhibitions open Saturday, October 20 from 6:00 – 8:00 pm, and will continue through November 24, 2018.
Main Gallery
Deborah Dancy: Un/Natural Occurrence
Slump, in geological terms, describes a form of mass wasting when a quantity of loosely consolidated material moves a distance, downward. “Paint Slumps” nicely describes my sculpture collection. Each sculpture is, in fact, the collected accumulation of paint scrapped off failed paintings and cleaned palette surfaces. This accumulated matter accrued from two-dimensional abstraction, is collected, piled and pushed over a period of time to become organically formed sculptural mass. As such, the collection is both the record and residue of the trial and error process of my painting.
Re-contextualize, this viscus matter has now become a newly actualized object of beauty and the abject. Intentionally combined with 20th century objects, – the idealized relics of “beauty and nature”– they become powerful signifiers to engage a reinterpretation of history and a critique of our future.
About the Artist:
Deborah Dancy (b.1949) is a multi-media artist abstract artist, whose paintings, drawings, digital photography and small sculptures are situated between abstraction and representation. She has been awarded Guggenheim Fellowship, a YADDO Fellow, and a National Endowment of the Arts NEFA awardee, an American Antiquarian Society Fellow and a Women’s Studio Workshop Fellow. Solo exhibitions include: Pernicious Beauty, K. Imperial Fine Art, San Francisco CA, Lush Life, N’Namdi Contemporary Miami, Chasing the Light, Sears Peyton Gallery, New York. Selected exhibitions include Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960’s to Today, The Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo. The Women’s Museum of Art, Washington DC and The Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL. and The Tide is High, Governors Island, NY. Her work has been reviewed in The Paris Review, ArtPulse Magazine, and Art New England, is in numerous collections including: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Birmingham Museum of Art, The Hunter Museum and The Detroit Institute of Art.
Second Gallery
Austin Turley: Correspondence
My artistic practice stems from, and responds to, the act of collecting. I am interested in the transient and transformative character of objects as they evolve, erode, and alter throughout time. These fragmented and ambiguous forms serve as a point of departure within my making process. It is through physical work with the material that the disparate elements become unified into a singular entity. I believe these materials possess the capacity to act as a proxy for things beyond itself and its seemingly simple material existence. I am drawn to the metaphorical nature of these things, the traces of life they carry, and the simultaneously objective and subjective memory that can be found in their contents.
About the Artist:
Austin Turley (b. 1977, San Antonio, TX) received a BFA in sculpture from Pacific Northwest College of Art. He has been awarded residencies at GLEAN (Portland, OR), Arquetopia (Puebla, Mexico), and a grant from the Regional Arts and Cultural Council. His work has been exhibited nationally, including the Sanchez Art Center (Pacifica CA), Perry and Carlson (Mount Vernon, WA), and Fort Works Art (Ft. Worth, TX). He currently resides in Portland, OR.
