On Thursday, October 10th, a group of artists will open exhibitions for the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. The gallery will have six solo shows. The work will be on display through November 3rd with a reception for the artists on Saturday, October 12th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

"But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim light was all I had been given, and patience without end…" - Samuel Beckett, Molloy

"…dismiss whatever insults your soul…" - Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass

"I started making Artifacts last year when I came back from Italy. I’ve made many pieces that began after looking at ruins in Italy (Pond Virgins, Thank you for My Adolescence, Angel in Flight, Pieta, Park Mother) but these new pieces are larger in scale. After visiting different religious site remains, and the Campidoglio on the Capitoline Hill in Rome where huge fragments of Constantine (giant head, hand, etc.) are placed haphazardly adjacent to the piazza with Michelangelo’s paving and building façades, I decided to make relics in this grander scale.

I made these pieces in clay on steel armatures. I think the clay’s texture will translate well into the surface of the concrete the pieces will be cast in. The creative process is followed by the making of huge, complicated rubber molds. The original steel armatures are removed from inside the clay, cleaned and re-used as the rebar internal to the concrete.

From afar, these pieces will appear normal in size but as you make the trip to see them closer they will become more and more enormous. The texture of the pieces will become more dominant when you are up close, providing a kind of road map to the body surfaces." - Deborah Masters, 2013

“Since the late 1950s, I’ve been inspired by prehistoric cave art. In 1967, I drew and exhibited an outline of an actual horse’s body, and it looked like a cave drawing. I had two shows, “Matrice” and “Rift,” in 1998 and 1999, in which I showed works in which I had “drawn” with barbed wire and used the remains of real animal bodies. Last year, I traveled to the Dordogne region of southern France, where I visited L’Abri de Cap Blanc in the Eyzies Caves. What I saw there completely and profoundly moved me to another place. I stayed in that rock shelter for two days.

There, in a single open space, a carved wall relief featured nearly a dozen wild animals emerging from the left and from the right. In the center of the composition there was a deep indentation. In front of this hole lay the skeletal remains of a curled-up human figure, which is believed to be that of a young woman. Researchers have credited her as the sole sculptor of these animals, which were created some 17,000 years ago. Through her powerful work, this ancient, unknown artist convinced me that she had felt and had believed in the power of empathy to give life meaning. What she knew was significant then, I know is significant now.

After I came back from France, for eight months I drew massive animals with the same yellow color that had been used at L’Abri de Cap Blanc. I wanted to make a sculpture, but it seemed somehow false to me to try to respond to that prehistoric art-maker using my usual weighty materials or the materials of her time. My experience in creating “And Then, And Now,” my newest work, which is the central piece in the current exhibition, felt to me something like the fleeting sense of the presence of someone you know who has died but to whom you are still calling out—and then suddenly sensing that she heard you. I felt that if I were to reach back 17,000 years in time and space, I would have to use a very light material. So came the wires.

I began working with pieces of chicken wire and threaded the parts together with all sorts of electrical wires. With them, in real space, I traced lines of gesture or movement, sometimes implying anatomy, or sometimes describing the nervous system or the blood system. I never thought about where to put the wires, exactly; it was as though I had become a spider, making something from inside of me, instinctively. As this new sculpture developed, I felt I had to rush to keep up with it, because it was evolving with or without me. I knew it was truly something that mattered unto itself. It has helped me define art and to once again let me know what art is for.” - Gillian Jagger, 2013

"Last summer I spent a week on a very small island, Crihaven, off the coast of Maine. Inhabited only seasonally by a few families of lobstermen, it is almost totally off grid. We were able to watch a young eagle from the cabin visit some of the rocky outcroppings and see his nest perched high on the top of a very tall pine tree at the water’s edge. It was formidable and I started painting his nest and environs: the natural world as we are rarely able to view it these days. Heroic and tragic." - Sara Jane Roszak, 2013

"These paintings are chronicles of my life. They spring from complicated love affairs, events, nature mortes and life's minutiae. Walnuts, empty wineglasses, lounging ladies and Bermuda clad imbibers are some of the protagonists that ignite and move my painterly investigation.” - Janice Nowinski, 2013

Painting vapor or the memory of a glimpse of industrial smoke propelled by nuclear power plants translates wisp into form. The selection of work on paper and panel exhibited here uses images generated by studies of smoke, exhaust, vapor and explosions as a means of questioning what is equally a threat or a moment of beauty. - Dale Emmart, 2013

John Davis Gallery
362 1/2 Warren Street
Hudson (NY) 12534 United States
Tel. +1 (518) 8285907
art@johndavisgallery.com
www.johndavisgallery.com

Opening hours
Thursday - Monday
From 11am to 5pm and by appointment