"Cut, Carve, Chisel, Sculpt" curated by Lesley Heller

Lesley Heller Workspace presents, Cut, Carve, Chisel, Sculpt - featuring the work of Nancy Bowen, Carol Hepper, Daisuke Kiyomiya, J.R. Larson, and Daniel Wiener.  This exhibition focuses on artistic process.  Two generations of sculptors are exhibited, all utilizing time honored methods to create their work. The artists employ a combination of woodworking, welding, molding, cutting, and chiseling, to achieve their vision. Each works with a diverse group of materials including tree branches, clay, blown glass, Apoxie Sculpt, terra cotta, beads, and dried flowers. The results remind the viewer of an artist’s ability to transform the everyday world around them.

Like an artistic archeologist, Nancy Bowen salvages disappearing ornament and craft traditions and incorporates them into her sculptures and drawings.  Early New England visual culture (grave rubbings, almanacs, astrology books) are combined with patterns and images of objects found on her travels to Asia. Beads cascade from the top of her wall pieces, creating patterns or words. Shells are decorated with far eastern patterns.  Blown glass and concrete are meshed into a single composition, standing together in an uneasy union.

Carol Hepperreceived her art first lesson when her father plugged a leak in a gas tank with a piece of her bubble gum.  Seeing the bubblegum against the tank, realizing it had transformed into a tool, made a significant impression on her.  Combining disparate materials and transforming them into an object that conveys the method of its making while leaving evidence of a solution to a problem is something Hepper searches for in her work.

Daniel Wiener is entranced by the formal possibilities and emotional power of facial structure. He is fascinated with the discovery that despite endless distortion, the face is universally recognizable.    Influenced by Philip Guston’s Poor Richard, along with Romaneque Gargoyles, Himalayan Cloth paintings, and the Rat Fink comics of Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth, Wiener’s heads are anything but ordinary.

Daisuke Kiyomiya uses a more intimate scale and process in his recent work. Inspired by his fascination with a single object created by a myriad of individual pieces, his ceramic work recalls a puzzle, and reflects his belief that everyone has a natural desire to unravel the mechanisms of the universe.

Raised in the Cajun South, J.R. Larson embraces a multitude of cultures, combining ritual festivities, including Mardi Gras and the mysticism surrounding voodoo, to create his spirited objects. His woven, torn, pierced and burned work is both personal and transformative.