GARRISON, NY.- Garrison Art Center is presenting a solo exhibition of “Tony Moore: Eternal Becoming. Wood-fired Ceramic Sculptures and Fire Paintings”, opening April 8 to May 7, 2023. The exhibition features 3 large solid mass ceramic and steel sculptures, 3 smaller Open Form slab-constructed sculptures and groupings of 18 ceramic and glass Fire Paintings on the walls. A newly published 38-page catalogue will be available, featuring informative essays by Carl Van Brunt and Doug Navarra.
Tony Moore is represented in international museum collections including the Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum, US and Derby Museum and Yorkshire Museum, UK. This will be his second solo exhibition with GAC in the Hudson Valley where, after 25 years in NYC he has resided and maintained a studio in Cold Spring for another 25 years where, on a mountain top property, he built a Japanese style Anagama-Noborigama wood-fire kiln. His ceramic works are fired in the kiln three times a year in communal week-long events.
Moore’s practice is concerned with the relationship of humanity and nature. He conceives of an expanded concept of ‘Nature’ as embodying all existence, both the seen and unseen, socio-political events, daily occurrences, as well as private intuitions that are made concrete through creative action. His objects are places of remembrance where multiplicities of associations take place. Most recently, these have been concerned with issues of the human condition.
Of the works in this exhibition, the artist has written “In recent ceramic sculptures, and Fire Paintings, abstracted figures -- made from cut twigs -- are impressed into wet clay. As I investigated, the figures kept running, fleeing, tumbling, searching, moving away from, and towards something else. They moved across landscapes towards glowing edifices and systemized structures, which both beckoned them, and somehow dominated them. The figures were present, yet also in spirit form, floating and dissolving in diaphanous light, and shimmering waters. Twigs became fathers, mothers, and children. They became surrogates, rather like small children’s dolls, playing out a deeply psychological fiction of desperately searching for ‘something’. Something hopeful, yet presently out of reach. Something eternally becoming …”
Within the context of current issues such as migration, global pandemic, and now the Russian-Ukraine war, these abstracted works evoke both contemporary anxieties, and aspirations toward the future.
