WEATHERING

LOY LUO, MONTANA SIMONE, BENJAMIN HELLER

MOUNTAIN – BENJAMIN HELLER, 22 x 16 x 10”, SCULPTURE, VERMONT MARBLE 2020 (FOREGROUND) AND TRACE – LOY LUO, MIXED MEDIA, 2021 (BACKGROUND)

“One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason. Vast moving faculties occur in this geological miasma, and they move in the most physical way. This movement seems motionless, yet it crushes the landscape of logic under glacial reveries.”
— ROBERT SMITHSON

The sculptures and paintings in Weathering share the marks of time, with the elements of earth, gravity, and water both making and unmaking their forms. They witness the human weathering of personal and collective change, weathering errors, victories, loves, losses, communion and isolation. These three artists’ works weave a telescopic narrative of time, pushing and pulling between the consistency of history and its ability to change on a dime.

The works build a body of transformed surfaces, all intensely process-based and containing progressive sedimentations of material that span physical time, ranging from the geological, ancient, and into the contemporary and industrial. Natural stone, oil pigments, concrete, steel - each speaks to the other on molecular and philosophical levels.

Loy Luo approaches her work as a form of abstract theater, utilizing painting and mixed media to create a space and ground that the viewer can find their own experience. The works are punctuated by lines that may be read as pathway as in trace, or green line” a threshold between above and below. Sand and soil build textures and richness, along with mostly obscured traces of Chinese text. The colors in the work are influenced by the glazes and tones of Chinese ceramics from the Song Dynasty (960 - 1279).

Montana Simone’s sculptural works take the elements of our built world, like steel and concrete, and edge against gravity and certainty. Finding the balance between hubris and beauty, they reflect the precariousness and poetry of the human/creative moment. In the sculpture Communion, the cast concrete is simultaneously birthing and dying, the husk of an ancient alien on display in a space of cartesian folly. Windsock is alive with a presence beyond the anthropomorphic, and Koan sits like a forgotten portal closing the torus of time.

The sculptures of Benjamin Heller invoke the presence of the human within the deeper time of stone and wood. He carves space for the body and an intimate landscape where two gestures can meet. In Mountain, the human features flow in and out of each other between the rough and hewn, the raw elements smoothened and softened to invite touch. The curation by Benjamin Heller has been approached as a conversation between the features of the works in the show as well as the three artists. The space for the show itself is also in keeping with that nature, as extension of Loy Luo’s concept of Abstract Theater, the gallery as an artwork, a place to find your own story and experience within the work.

The curation by Benjamin Heller has been approached as a conversation between the features of the works in the show as well as the three artists. The space for the show itself is also in keeping with that nature, as extension of Loy Luo’s concept of Abstract Theater, the gallery as an artwork, a place to find your own story and experience within the work.