WANAFOTO: Jackson Hole

Showing posts with label Jackson Hole. Show all posts

27/07/25

41 British Artists Exhibition @ Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole - "One Thing Touches Another" Curated by Emma Hill and Tom Hammick

One Thing Touches Another

Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole

July 31 - September 14, 2025

Ken Kiff

Untitled - After Domenichino, 1996

Encaustic on paper, 40 1/8 x 59 7/8 inches

Lorna Robertson

Portrait of a Lazy Woman, 2024

Oil, linseed oil and varnish on paper, 20 5/8 x 18 ¾ inches

Prunella Clough

Black Flower, 1993

Oil on canvas, 44 x 48 3/4 inches

Maya Frodeman Gallery presents One Thing Touches Another, a group exhibition curated by Emma Hill and Tom Hammick.

The ideas behind One Thing Touches Another began from a simple premise which was to ask whether the language of painting has agency in an increasingly turbulent world. The exhibition offers a view of painting as an essential language of connection – as the physical manifestation of another’s thoughts. A form of invitation – a reaching towards.

Artists: Eileen Agar, Remi Ajani, Karolina Albricht, Ned Armstrong, Charles Avery, Basil Beattie, Maria Chevska, Prunella Clough, Denise de Cordova, Andrew Cranston, Martyn Cross, Joseph Dilnot, Peter Doig, James Fisher, Nick Goss, Phil Goss, Susie Hamilton, Tom Hammick, Marcus Harvey, Celia Hempton, Roger Hilton, Paul Housley, Andrzej Jackowski, Merlin James, Ken Kiff, Deborah Lerner, John Maclean, Elizabeth Magill, Kathryn Maple, Scott McCracken, Jeff McMillan, Margaret Mellis, Roy Oxlade, Carol Rhodes, Dan Roach, Lorna Robertson, William Scott, Myra Stimson, Graeme Todd, Phoebe Unwin, and Alice Walter.

Martyn Cross

Way Yonder Trouble, 2021

Oil on canvas, 12 x 18 inches

John Maclean

Swamp Things, 2025

Watercolor on board, 11 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches

The exhibition brings together work by 41 British artists, from internationally established figures to emerging young contemporaries. It reveals connections and currents in British art that span 75 years, with work by significant artists of the Modern British era, including Eileen Agar, Prunella Clough, Roger Hilton and William Scott, historic paintings by Ken Kiff and Roy Oxlade (whose influence as teachers travels into the present time), and recent work by artists including Basil Beattie RA, Andrew Cranston, Peter Doig and Marcus Harvey.

Though not bound by any one formal aesthetic, a prevailing aspect of the selection is the exploration of ideas expressed through depictions of landscape, both real and imaginary. The rich diversity of current practice in the UK is reflected in examples by contemporary artists including Charles Avery, Denise de Cordova, James Fisher, Tom Hammick, Nick Goss, John Maclean, Elizabeth Magill, Merlin James and Phoebe Unwin. The show also introduces a number of young painters to the US for the first time, selected by Tom Hammick, who worked for many years as a teacher.

The title of the exhibition is premised upon the words of painter Maria Chevska, writing in 2023:

The common factor—one thing touches another thing
Using the language of small gestures... tenuous, empathic, transforming,
holding, listening,
and the tensions held between bodies and spaces...

Thematic strands run through One Thing Touches Another that relate to landscape, still life, mythmaking, and folklore, but what connects all the work is a sense of the artist approaching painting as a site of perception. Axiomatically the exhibition also examines the materiality of paint as a medium.

Within the exhibition there are numerous meeting points: historic artists who have influenced, artists who have taught other artists, friends, partners, siblings. Conceived by an artist and a curator who have known and worked together in London since the late 1980s, One Thing Touches Another presents eloquent evidence of the value of painting as a vital language in the contemporary world.

This exhibition is accompanied by a physical catalogue featuring an essay by Emma Hill.

Guest-curator Emma Hill founded Eagle Gallery / EMH Arts in London in 1991. Throughout her career, she has championed emerging artists through innovative exhibitions, artist publications and off-site installations. Renowned as one of London’s pioneering alternative art spaces in the early 1990’s Eagle Gallery has nurtured talents now celebrated globally. Hill is currently a guest curator at Turps Gallery, London and has curated institutional exhibitions including Ken Kiff: The Sequence at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art (2018) and Stephen Chambers: The Court of Redonda for the 57th Venice Biennale (2017). Her visionary initiatives have fostered collaborations with esteemed institutions including Aldeburgh Music, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venezia, and now Maya Frodeman Gallery.

Hill’s co-curator Tom Hammick is an artist living and working in London and East Sussex in the UK. He studied art history at the University of Manchester and later fine painting at Camberwell College of Art and NSCAD, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada. He has an MA in printmaking, also from Camberwell, and until recently taught fine art painting and printmaking for many years at The University of Brighton. Hammick is the proud father of three grown children as well as a lover of music, theater, film, opera and poetry, all of which informs his work in a profound and tangible way. His work is held in various public and private collections worldwide, including the British Museum, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, U.K.; Towner Eastbourne, U.K.; Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, CT; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; New York Public Library, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Bibiothèque National de France, Paris; and The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Tom Hammick was selected to join the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in New Haven, CT as an artist-in-residence in 2023.

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY

66 South Glenwood Street, Jackson Hole, Wyoming 83001

www.mayafrodemangallery.com

23/03/25

Inherent Nature @ Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole - A group exhibition of paintings and works on paper, curated by artist Kathryn Lynch

Inherent Nature

Curated by Kathryn Lynch

Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole

April 4 - May 18, 2025

Will Gabaldón

Trees and Cloud, 2024

Oil on panel, 12 x 12 inches,

Framed dimensions 16 3/4 x 16 3/4 inches

Aubrey Levinthal

I-76 Underpass, 2024

Oil on panel, 18 x 14 inches

Lisa Sanditz

Hudson River/Devil Pods/Barge, 2024

Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 inches

Elizabeth Hazan

Some Trees, 2025

Oil on linen, 66 x 55 inches

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY presents Inherent Nature, an invitational group exhibition of paintings and works on paper, curated by artist Kathryn Lynch. The first of its kind at the gallery, Inherent Nature brings together seventeen landscape painters working today whose work addresses and interprets the natural and manmade world.

Featuring artists beyond the gallery roster, this exhibition invokes the words of Emily Dickinson’s poem The Outer—from the Inner and invites the exploration of human nature and our place in the world from a variety of vantage points. Tania Alvarez, Olive Ayhens, Deborah Brown, JoAnne Carson, Nancy Diamond, Jonathan Edelhuber, Will Gabaldón, Elliott Green, Elizabeth Hazan, Melora Kuhn, Aubrey Levinthal, Kathryn Lynch, Lizbeth Mitty, Donna Moylan, Mason Saltarrelli, Lisa Sanditz, and Suzy Spence each approach paint and the painted landscape as individual entities with a unique story to tell; their Inner painting their perceived Outer.

The Inner—paints the Outer—
The Brush without the Hand—
Its Picture publishes—precise—
As is the inner Brand—

On fine—Arterial Canvas—
A Cheek—perchance a Brow—
The Star's whole Secret—in the Lake—
Eyes were not meant to know.

Emily Dickinson, The Outer—from the Inner

At first glance, this grouping feels replete with unlikely bedfellows. From Tania Alvarez’ small-scale, sculptural mixed media works of manmade environs to the poppy, art historical fever dream of Jonathan Edelhuber and exquisitely rendered forests of Will Gabaldón, one wonders how they could possibly relate. However, given the opportunity, Mason Saltarrelli’s abstracted forms speak directly to the heady bouquet of cosmic flora of JoAnne Carson and Lisa Sanditz’ deep tonal color fields. Lizbeth Mitty’s impasto-heavy dreamscape atmospherically sets a precedent to view both Nancy Diamond’s pseudo-surrealist articulated clouds and Donna Moylan’s figures, set like constellations in a field of stars. In Dickinson’s words, perhaps, “eyes were not meant to know.” Here, however, eyes rejoice.

Artist and guest-curator KATHRYN LYNCH was born and raised in Philadelphia. She received her undergraduate degree from William Smith College in Geneva, NY, and an MA at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. She was awarded the NYSCA/NYFA artist Fellow in Painting in 2018. She has been invited to Skowhegan, Yaddo, The Marie Walsh Foundation and The Vermont Studio Center. Since earning her MFA, Lynch has held solo exhibitions and participated in well over thirty group shows both and internationally. Her work is in the permanent collections of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA and Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN, as well as many corporate collections, including Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and the Millennium Art Collection in the Ritz Carlton, Battery Park, in NYC. The artist lives in Catskill, NY, and works in a curated artist campus called Foreland.

The exhibition is accompanied by a digital catalogue featuring an essay by Grant Wahlquist.

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY

66 South Glenwood Street, Jackson Hole, Wyoming 83001

www.mayafrodemangallery.com

05/02/25

Ceramist Fiona Waterstreet @ Maya Froderman Gallery, Jackson Hole - "Vessels" Exhibition

Fiona Waterstreet: Vessels

Maya Froderman Gallery, Jackson Hole

February 14 - March 30, 2025

FIONA WATERSTREET

Untitled, 2024

Stoneware, 12 x 12 x 19 ½ inches

FIONA WATERSTREET

Untitled, 2024

Stoneware, 12 x 12 x 19 ½ inches

FIONA WATERSTREET

Untitled, 2024

Stoneware, 12 x 12 x 19 ½ inches

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY presents Vessels, a solo exhibition with English ceramicist FIONA WATERSTREET.

Fiona Waterstreet is a maestro of tactile expression. Having spent her career developing an organic aesthetic, her ceramics convey a distinct humanism in the enduring trace of her hand found in each object. Vessels, her second solo exhibition with Maya Frodeman Gallery, presents fifteen recent ceramic works and five drawings that exemplify Waterstreet’s winsome coalescence of hand-building and drawing.

When Fiona Waterstreet first started working with clay at the Greenwich House Pottery Studio in New York nearly fourteen years ago, she was largely throwing on a wheel. Despite having no previous arts education, and ceramics being a largely ignored branch of the fine arts, she says that she fell in love with the tactility and uncertainty of working with clay. “The art thing started to seep into me,” Waterstreet remembers. She began creating more sculptural objects, bringing a form to life within her hands. Fiona Waterstreet enjoyed the meditative process that begins in water and minerals and ends in anticipation as it transforms within a fiery kiln as she began making abstracted birds and forms from porcelain. “Ceramics are a nut you have to crack,” says Fiona Waterstreet. “There’s an intrigue to it. Every time you open the kiln, you’re surprised.” Since then, Waterstreet has also held solo exhibitions with McClain Gallery of Houston, Texas, and the Drawing Room, East Hampton, New York.

Her newest body of work includes pieces that nod to her earlier practice. One such piece is the stoneware bowl, which was the only work in the exhibition created on a potter’s wheel. Despite this, the bowl finds affinity in her recent work through the expressive, sweeping brushstrokes that dance across its surface. Vessels also includes a set of two small bird forms, bulbous, elegant, and curious. The gentle tilt of the neck, the arch of the back, and the details of the beak: these works, more traditional to Fiona Waterstreet’s oeuvre, show her propensity for capturing the je ne sais quoi of the avian spirit in an organic, abstracted form.

Vessels marks a watershed in Waterstreet’s practice in her ability to go bigger through hand-building, as one monumental vessel stands nearly three feet tall. It was also an exercise of taking the universal form of a vessel and pushing it out of simple functionality, and out of tradition. Many of Waterstreet’s vessels recall those from antiquity, with a subtle cracking to their glaze, caused by Waterstreet’s use of terra sigillata, an ancient Italian method of putting an ultra-refined slip on the clay that tends to crackle in the firing process. Meaning “earth seal,” terra sigillata was used by ancient Greeks and Romans to make vessels watertight, but Fiona Waterstreet experimented with terra sigillata to create surface texture and add color to her works. Other works are subtly carved with leaf motifs. This “drawing” on the surface of her vessels was a novel way for Fiona Waterstreet to imprint her organic aesthetic onto each piece, another way the viewer can see the perennial presence of Waterstreet’s hand. The exhibition brings these works together with her realist pencil drawings. Many of these works were done in 2020, when Fiona Waterstreet, isolated and without her kiln, began drawing portraits of all the people she could not see in person at the time. Her more pastoral location, away from the hustle and bustle of the Soho loft home and studio she shares with her husband, artist John Alexander, inspired her to create studies of bird nests and leaves that later inspired her most recent ceramics.

Fiona Waterstreet’s high relief vessels, whose forms are abstracted and concealed by tangles of leaves, mimic the carvings and motifs of her other works. These works exude a similar air of antiquity as if they were pulled out of a long-forgotten country home enveloped in vines. Working through the abstraction of organic forms, she manages to retain the traditional essence of each object. “It’s the crux of what I do. I have a formality to myself, and I have a formality to my work, but it’s not interesting to me unless I can take it a bit further, unless I can bring abstraction in.” Building each vessel by hand, Fiona Waterstreet relishes in the process of distortion that follows. In working with organic forms and a feminine hand, she creates forms that embody elegance as much as they exude whimsy. As she has honed her distinct style over the past fourteen years, Waterstreet’s practice is one of experimentation, and by proxy, of transmutation. “I often wonder what my work will be like in five years… Really, I feel like I’m in the early stages of my journey.”

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY

66 South Glenwood Street, Jackson Hole, Wyoming 83001

www.mayafrodemangallery.com

29/12/24

Raúl Díaz @ Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole - "Bote de Piedra" Exhibition

Raúl Díaz: Bote de Piedra

Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole

December 20, 2024 - February 9, 2025

Raúl Díaz

Neblina, 2014-2016

Mixed media on wood panel, 53 x 67 3/8 inches

Raúl Díaz

Lago III, 2017

Mixed media on wood panel, 50 3/8 x 64 3/4 inches

Raúl Díaz

Desparramados, 2022

Bronze, 14 ½ x 16 x 10 inches

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY presents Bote de Piedra, a solo exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Argentine artist RAUL DIAZ, on view at the gallery's downtown location.

Bote de Piedra brings together both painting and sculpture by the Argentine artist. Through his works, Raúl Díaz invites us to seek refuge in a secret universe that exists within each of us – a soothing, friendly space characterized by the presence of beauty and the solitude of personal soul searching that rarely surfaces amidst the chaos of contemporary life. Evoked by the artist’s memories of his childhood, the mystical quietude of Díaz’s artworks is deeply personal and indicative of his own spiritual adventure. The images produce a sense of nostalgia and stillness that compels the viewer to reflect on their own life and their place within the endless story of history.

The surface of Raúl Díaz’s paintings are wooden panels, embossed on handmade papers. He uses unique mixed techniques to produce a tactile impression on the surface of wood and paper that contributes to his otherworldly images. This exhibition also presents sculptural work by the artist that, taking the images into three dimensions, creates a new experience for the viewer and expands Díaz’s own technical prowess. In his practice, he leans into experimentation throughout his oeuvre, employing wood, bronze, resin, stone, marble, ceramics, handmade paper, dry pigments, chalk, acrylic, and watercolor. In what he calls his “permanent search”, Díaz explores and manipulates new materials so that they deftly suit his distinctive style and themes.

Since his first exhibitions in the early 1980s, Raúl Díaz has shown an inclination towards expressing himself through the human figures. Díaz’s construction of the figure is forged from an abstracted ethereal conception rather than an anatomical representation of the human form. The characters that appear in his works are planar, out of scale silhouettes in poses of peaceful work or contemplation. The depth of color and textures in the backgrounds of Díaz’s artworks create a dream-like atmosphere, whether they be serene mountains or stacked kites or boats. Drawing imagery from his childhood memories of lake fishing with his father and grandfather, the sight of wooden fishing boats, either dotting the water or stacked on the beach, is indelible in the artist’s memory, and these same vessels frequently appear in the work. The simplicity of the figures against these dynamic, yet still harmonious, backgrounds instill a sense of calm in the viewer that is distinctive of Díaz’s works.

RAUL DIAZ was born in 1952 in Córdoba, Argentina. In 1990, he moved to Unquillo in the province of Córdoba, where he continues to live and produce his art. Although Raúl Díaz studied architecture, he could not avoid the overwhelming calling he had within himself to be a painter. Self-taught, Díaz has emerged as one of Argentina's most prominent artists. Since 1995, he has participated in National and International Art Fairs, and in numerous group exhibitions in Argentina and abroad. He has had individual exhibitions in Córdoba, Buenos Aires, the United States, Holland, Spain and Italy. He has also received important awards, including the Grand Prize from the National Painting Salon of the Pro-Arte Foundation, Córdoba (1990). In 2005, he held a solo exhibition at the Sivori Museum of Plastic Arts in Buenos Aires, and in 2010, Díaz had a solo exhibition at the Emilio Caraffa Museum in Córdoba. His works are found in important private and museum collections in the countries where he has exhibited his works.

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY

66 South Glenwood Street Jackson Hole, Wyoming 83001

www.mayafrodemangallery.com

16/11/24

Marianne Kemp @ Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole - "Essentially Unbound" Exhibition

Marianne Kemp: Essentially Unbound

Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole

20 September - 1 December 2024

MARIANNE KEMP

Dew, 2024

Horsehair, cotton and pins, 59 x 78 3/4 x 1 5/8 inches

MARIANNE KEMP

Late and Soon, 2024

Horsehair, cotton, wood, canvas, and acrylic paint

39 3/8 x 51 1/8 x 4 inches

MARIANNE KEMP

Electric Move, 2022

Horsehair, cotton and pins, 23 5/8 x 9 7/8 x 3 1/8 inches

Maya Frodeman Gallery presents Essentially Unbound, a solo exhibition with Dutch artist MARIANNE KEMP.

Essentially Unbound, Marianne Kemp’s second solo exhibition with Maya Frodeman Gallery, finds the artist further exploring the technical intricacies of her unique chosen craft: woven horsehair. Using horsehair with varying combinations of other materials like raw plant fibers, and, most recently Korean Hanji paper and gold lurex, Kemp works with meticulous precision to create otherworldly forms that seem to organically morph, yet remain abstracted and enigmatic. The horsehair, the warp and the loom are the three fundamental elements of her practice, the starting points, and the primary and necessary tools. In weaving, a warp is a set of long, lengthwise fibers that run vertically up and down a textile, stretched in place on a loom before the weaving process begins; the weft is what is woven into the warp to create textiles, and where Kemp’s creativity takes flight. “I am a weaver because I am using a loom, and an artist, because what I do with the loom system,” Marianne Kemp says.

Marianne Kemp uses both traditional and nonconventional weaving techniques to create her three-dimensional environments through her unique practice of molding, knotting, curling and looping the sculptural horsehair fibers. Through properties unique to horsehair and other, largely organic materials, her woven works can appear shiny and smooth, organic and wild, or flexible and stiff. “Horsehair has its own characteristics. And for 24 years, I have wanted to show it in a different way. It keeps surprising me,” Marianne Kemp says. Her practice is very much grounded in her experimentation with technique. Works in Essentially Unbound, such as Dew (2024) and Late and Soon (2024), are united by Kemp’s exuberant use of color. This has brought joy and lightness into her studio practice—a practice that can often feel weighed down by the bounds of time. Kemp’s chosen materials and tools are profoundly time-consuming. The hours upon days upon weeks that go into her works beget that every decision Kemp makes- creative or technical- is made decisively. The visual weightlessness of this body of work, especially in the face of the time and planning that goes into each piece, also lends to the exhibitions’ title. Kemp uses the warp quite minimally in many of these works. Because of this, these works are literally less bound, and more sculptural. The result is most often otherworldly forms, as with Electric Move (2022) and Breaking the Silence (2023). Kemp’s technique anchors her materials, and with increasing experimentation, the works feel less and less bound by the textile art tradition and read more as innovative and cross-disciplinary sculpture.

When creating her works, Marianne Kemp looks inward for inspiration. As she sits in her studio, her brain twinkles with possibilities. “Behind my loom, I'm in this bubble, and the ideas are just coming. I can just pluck them from the air,” she marvels. Kemp’s ideas grow and morph as she spends hours upon hours behind her looms. Her intimate knowledge of and skill in weaving enables and fuels this creative process. Kemp’s work is less about weaving as a craft and more about the process and effect of creating texture and volume, zones of interest that invite the viewer in. Kemp’s works are truly a viewing experience, and, at first, an encounter with the alien. From afar, they can resemble paintings, tapestries, or alien structures, but as the viewer steps closer, the works become an intricate, active surface. The more experimental and unconventional Kemp’s work becomes, the more technical it is. When a new idea bobs to the surface of Kemp’s mind, it follows that then each centimeter must be study and planned, and every rhythm must be calculated to bring that idea to life. Her brain is equal parts artist and engineer. Kemp’s ability and expertise enables her creativity, just as her creativity fuels her technical practice.

Marianne Kemp was born in Woerden, and began sewing at the age of 13. Kemp’s early interest in textiles led her to study art at The Royal Academy of Art and Design in The Hague before moving to London to pursue her Master of Arts from the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. Upon completion of her Master’s, Kemp decided to stay in London and started working from Cockpit Arts Studios in Central London. In 2003 she returned to the Netherlands. In her studio she works with four different looms, each capable of different weaving possibilities. Kemp’s work has been exhibited in the United States, the United Kingdom, and across Europe, as well as in Seoul, South Korea. Her work has appeared in numerous publications in her native Netherlands and abroad, including magazines World of Interiors and Metiér, and books Transmaterial by Blaine Brownell and Contemporary Textiles by Drusilla Cole. Marianne Kemp lives and works in Zutphen, the Netherlands.

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY

66 South Glenwood Street, Jackson Hole, Wyoming 83001

www.mayafrodemangallery.com

29/09/24

Max Wade @ Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole - "Dodge and Burn" Exhibition

Max Wade: Dodge and Burn

Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole

September 20 - November 3, 2024

MAX WADE

Steeplechase, 2020-2024

Oil on linen, 51 1/4 x 39 3/8 inches

MAX WADE

Foothills, 2024

Oil on linen, 74 3/4 x 63 inches

MAX WADE

Mirror, 2022

Oil on linen, 35 3/8 x 27 1/2 inches

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY presents, Dodge and Burn, a solo exhibition of work by British artist MAX WADE.

Dodge and Burn, Max Wade’s first solo exhibition with Maya Frodeman Gallery and in the US, presents twelve oil paintings which further expand on his autobiographical painting practice and demonstrate his growing interest in technique and materiality. Rooted in representation, Max Wade’s paintings are imagined landscapes in flux, where forms emerge and dissolve within fields of color and texture, resisting objective interpretation. Titled after the analog photography technique of “dodging and burning,” which is used during the darkroom process to physically manipulate the exposure of subjects separate from their environment in photographic prints, Dodge and Burn nods to Max Wade’s painting process. In his practice in which planes interchange and motifs are obscured, Max Wade has his own physical process of manipulation and interruption as he applies and removes paint to create depth, texture, and a sense of ambiguity that invites the viewer into an ever-evolving dialogue with the work.

Max Wade consciously strives for ambiguity in his works. He cultivates paintings that ask questions of the viewers, striking up a conversation, rather than attempting to give answers. Despite this ambiguity, his works remain firmly grounded in the real world. Max Wade pulls his subjects from his everyday life and travels, as he is drawn especially to overlooked spaces, with a sustained focus on the liminal areas in-between objects as he often builds forms from negative space rather than the subjects themselves. His process begins with his sketchbook drawings, which are both a conscious exercise and a tool for his practice. These drawings are airy networks of relations, shapes cast by suspended encounters, rather than detailed documentation of Max Wade’s day-to-day life. From these representational drawings, Max Wade gathers new forms and spatial relations to work from. After further exploring and synthesizing these forms through further drawing and repetition, Max Wade takes his harvest to large-scale canvases, first drawing with charcoal and then rapidly applying the oil in washes of pigment. As he pushes, pulls, scrapes and jabs his medium, most often layering wet paint on wet paint, his work blooms as he adds elements from other drawings to create a patchwork of distilled experience. Max Wade’s practice of addition and subtraction is intuitive as he works between many paintings at once. These pieces unfold over months and even years, as with Steeplechase (2020-2024).

Max Wade’s style is marked by sweeping, gestural brushstrokes indicative of his process-driven approach and his deep engagement with the act of painting itself. Often taking on a large scale, Max Wade invokes the physical style of Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Grace Hartigan, as well as contemporaries like Amy Sillman. Max Wade’s use of a bright, saturated palette contributes to his works’ undeniable joyous, emphatic quality. Their compositions are defined by the lyrical tension between these colors, textures and suggested subjects. It is a tension that isn’t so much resolved as channeled, by means of repetition, adaptation and restatement, into a rewarding vitality. Max Wade is also concerned with the physicality of the painting process, especially at a large scale. The vestigial movement, rhythm, and energy are ever-present and lend to dynamic, expressive paintings which pulsate with life, inviting viewers into a space where lived experience and abstraction converge. Each work’s rhythm and mood are largely set by music, another tool central to Max Wade’s practice. A combination of styles and genres, from frantic jazz to repetitive minimalist compositions, this music paces and invigorates the physicality of Max Wade’s studio practice.

MAX WADE was born in 1985 in London. Max Wade studied Fine Art Painting at Brighton University. Max Wade’s recent solo exhibitions include ‘Dodge and Burn’, Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole, USA; ‘Go Bang’, Sid Motion Gallery, London, UK 'Whisper Down the Lane', Sid Motion Gallery, London, 2021; ‘Sowing the Soil with Salt’, Sid Motion Gallery, London, 2020; ‘Platform: London’, hosted by David Zwirner (online), 2020; ‘Wind for the Sails’, Messums Wiltshire, Salisbury, 2020; ‘Between the Dog and the Wolf’, Sid Motion Gallery, London, 2019; ‘For Tina’, curated by Roxie Warder hosted at Cob Gallery, London, 2019. Recent group exhibitions have included ‘Abstract Colour’, Marlborough Gallery, 2023. ’Stand with Ukraine', Hales London, 2022. His residencies include Artist’s Workshop & Exchange, Muscat, Oman in 2013. Max Wade lives and works in London.

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY

66 South Glenwood Street Jackson Hole, Wyoming 83001

www.mayafrodemangallery.com

11/05/24

Artist Chloé Peytermann @ Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole - "Bark or the Poney" Exhibition of Ceramic Sculpture

Chloé Peytermann: Bark or the Poney

Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole

10 May - 9 June 2024

CHLOÉ PEYTERMANN

Blue Love, 2024

Ceramic, 10 x 5 ½ inches

CHLOÉ PEYTERMANN

The Boat, 2024

Ceramic, 5 ¼ x 7 ½ inches

CHLOÉ PEYTERMANN

The Hug, 2024

Ceramic, 7 ½ x 3 ¼ inches

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY (formerly Tayloe Piggott Gallery) presents The Bark or the Poney, a solo exhibition of ceramic sculpture by French artist CHLOÉ PEYTERMANN.

“It's hard for me to give up images / I need the plowshare to go through me / Mirror of winter, of age / I need to be seeded by time.”

- Philippe Jaccottet

Citing the a poem by Swiss Francophone poet and translator Jaccottet, Chloé Peytermann also wrote the following about this solo exhibition, her first with Maya Frodeman Gallery:

“Recently, in the workshop and in my hands, things took a surprising turn, and I was the first to be surprised.It was a turn towards a form of figuration, or an abstraction becoming figurative. Human characters and animals, often fanciful, shaped at speed, the fruit of an inspired gesture, in search of a fleeting emotion or a meaningful movement. Moments of tenderness, of doubt, of strangeness, of promise, are frozen, as it were, in the fired clay and the matte surface of the glaze. In these small paradoxical objects is an expression which swells up as it is pared down; waiting for its emergence, I stay somehow aloof, without feeling proud. The glaze is their skin, the ceramic material is there in all its power, revealing the spontaneity of touch, containing the form within a gentleness which holds on to time. Immutable snapshots of an instant, these clay sketches have found an anchor, taken their place and formed a society. They are characters looking at us and questioning us in our own epoch, but issued from a distant and legendary past. They seem to have withdrawn from our noisy world. They are waiting. Their melancholy is turning into a call.”

Chloé Peytermann captures human moments and connections in the form of enchanting ceramic figurines. These figures hint at humanity, but are never fully identifiable as man, animal, object, or something in between. Yet, they are embodiments of uniquely human emotions; moments of tenderness, doubt, strangeness, and promise become frozen in the firing of her beautiful enamel work. Often vaguely anthropomorphic, the figures are still, silent, and at times seemingly stuck, as if waiting for something, the zenith of the moment so whimsically captured.

CHLOÉ PEYTERMANN graduated in 2006 with a diploma in ceramic design. Chloé Peytermann’s work is exhibited in many galleries in France, Switzerland and Belgium. Her work is also part of the permanent collection of the Swiss Museum of Ceramics and Glass in Geneva and the Atelier de Kahla collection. In 2010, Chloé Peytermann won the Kahla Kreativ competition. She has presented her work in many contemporary ceramic fairs internationally, notably in South Corea. Chloé Peytermann lives and works in Dieulefit, France.

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY

66 South Glenwood Street, Jackson Hole, Wyoming 83001

www.mayafrodemangallery.com

13/01/24

Stephen Talasnik @ Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole - "Otherworldly: Select Drawings" Exhibition

Stephen Talasnik

Otherworldly: Select Drawings

Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole

14 December 2023 – 4 February 2024

Stephen Talasnik

Journal of Memory, 2023

Graphite on paper, 15 ½ x 58 ½ inches

Stephen Talasnik

Savant, 2013

Graphite on paper, 70 x 48 inches

Stephen Talasnik

Elusive Figure #1, 2022-2023

Graphite and ink on paper, 30 x 22 inches

TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY presents Otherworldly: Select Drawings, its first solo exhibition featuring drawings by New York-based artist Stephen Talasnik.

Featuring a substantive selection of black and white drawings spanning the last twenty-plus years of his career, this exhibition explores the pictorial achievements of an artist who has pushed technical drawing beyond mark making to an experience with, as Lebbeus Woods noted, “this power to fascinate, confound, and reveal.” Through Stephen Talasnik’s hand we experience an adventure into an imagined world at the intersection of drawing and building.

Stephen Talasnik’s drawings explore otherworldly landscape and objects that evoke childhood memories. “If there was ever a moment of divine inspiration, it would be the instance I saw the General Motors’ Futurama exhibition and the Panorama of the City of New York at the 1964 Fair,” said Talasnik. “A lifelong obsession with visionary architecture was established at the Fair and I started doing drawings and sculptures of future cities after wandering through the Pavilions.”

Originally from Philadelphia, Stephen Talasnik grew up in an urban neighborhood surrounded by oil refineries, a shipyard, a helicopter factory, and an airport, immersing him in the aesthetics of industrial building. He lived in a house that bordered a local creek, providing him an opportunity to unearth the past as he searched for fossils imbued with fictional narratives. He turned these experiences into a world explored through drawing with pencil and building complex structures from wood.

Stephen Talasnik has spent the better part of sixty years inventing the past and envisioning and documenting the future. His work is informed by time travel and myth-making, intrigued with the infrastructure of the urban environment. The work is, as the title of the exhibition indicates, otherworldly, suggesting a moment in time without providing absolute coordinates. Often defined as “Fictional Engineering”, he uses no system of measurement, relying on the aesthetics of intuition and invention.

Working in his Brooklyn studio and ever informed by intuitive engineering and the human form, Stephen Talasnik continues to explore the unlimited capacity of the fictional object and landscape. Seduced by a visionary’s mantra, he relies on his personal encyclopedia of experience to define an imagined world that explores the visual capacity of a self-defined beauty. Archeological in nature, the viewer is invited to examine a personalized lexicon; extracting clues but challenged to determine specific identity. Employing pencil or wood, Stephen Talasnik’s works must always suggest the unfinished yet complete.

Stephen Talasnik attended the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA) where he studied Black and White theory with photographers Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, who nurtured his passion for drawing. His graduate studies took him to Rome with the Tyler School of Art (MFA) where he drew both the human form and architecture from the Classical environment. After completing his formal studies, Stephen Talasnik moved to Tokyo where he spent three years. It was in Tokyo that a fascination with hand building re-emerged after studying the art of bamboo construction. Following his time in Japan, Stephen Talasnik spent ten years traveling through Asia, all while commuting to his studio in New York City. These seminal experiences inform Stephen Talasnik’s obsession with drawing and building landscapes and objects that defy time or place.

In 2010, Stephen Talasnik ventured into the world of land art, and has completed major installations at the Storm King Art Center (NY); the Tippet Rise Art Center (MO); the Denver Botanic Garden (CO); the Russel Wright Design Center (NY); and Architektur Galerie Berlin. Stephen Talasnik has maintained ongoing studio investigations while exhibiting internationally. His work has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY); the Albertina (Vienna); the British Museum (London); the National Gallery of Art (DC); the Pompidou Centre (Paris); and the Whitney Museum (NY) among others. Stephen Talasnik lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY

62 South Glenwood Street, Jackson, WY 83001

www.tayloepiggottgallery.com

21/12/23

Artist Travis Walker @ Tayloe Piggott Gallery West, Wilson - "Right at Home" Exhibition

Travis Walker: Right at Home

Tayloe Piggott Gallery West, Wilson

22 December 2023 - 21 January 2024

Tayloe Piggott Gallery presents Right at Home an exhibition of paintings by local artist Travis Walker. This is the gallery's first exhibition at its additional space on the west side of Jackson Hole town- 3465 North Pines Way, Wilson, Wyoming.

Travis Walker questions the notion of America and what it means to be American by portraying the shared but often separate experiences of the iconic American western landscape. Ever-considering how this vast landscape shapes and frames American culture, Walker observes the world changing around him and eternalizes these moments through painting, drawing, and printmaking. Following in the footsteps of American regionalists Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, and Maynard Dixon, Walker embeds a profound sense of place and culture in each work he creates. In doing so, he captures the timeless, playful, and often juxtaposed spirit of different regions across the United States, most often in the American West.

Travis Walker is drawn to places and images that feel timeless, as if somehow caught between eras. Inspired by both nature and other objects of culture, such as film and comic books, Walker often blends found imagery with his observation of the western landscape. In these acts of autofiction, Walker creates his own, often surreal, scenes in which the familiar often becomes somewhat estranged—a bricolage of what Walker has seen, felt, and imagined. In creating his compositions, Walker also turns to cinema for inspiration. He studies the angles and perspectives the cinematographer or director has chosen. On occasion, Travis Walker says, he even lifts characters from the silver screen and transplants them into a Jackson landscape.

Travis Walker often works on location in Jackson Hole, capturing the seemingly mundane, quiet scenes of an old western town at a critical juncture. In Walker’s works, these places feel empty yet still inviting, as Walker’s colors create a near-dreamlike quality. By reducing the intricacies of peaks and crevices, solitary doorways, and deserted streets, Walker clears the way for a new kind of narrative—one that exchanges pioneers in covered wagons and romanticized cowboys for travelers in recreational vehicles. Using a style reminiscent of Hopper—a regionalist as well as a modernist who depicted the isolation of progress—Walker, too, evokes the voices of those left behind to document the convoluted pathways to tomorrow. “A lot of my work has to do with America,” Travis Walker says. “I love the West, and I love the land. I moved out here following a dream, and every day I think about the landscape here, what direction I want to go.”

TRAVIS WALKER was born in Tokyo, Japan, and grew up as an Air Force brat whose nomadic childhood was filled with comic books, science fiction, and drawing. After graduating with a degree in Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University, the allure of the western landscape drew him to the valley of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he has lived and worked for nearly 20 years, blending contemporary landscape painting with the fictional worlds of his past. Walker was a 2013 panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts' Artists Communities Grant. He was a 2013 Artist in Residence at the National Museum of Wildlife Art, and in 2012, he won the "Rising Star Award" from the Cultural Council of Jackson Hole. His work has been featured in SouthWest Art Magazine, Big Sky Journal, Mountain Living, Forbes, and The Guardian. He is the founder of the nonprofit Teton Artlab, an Artist In Residence program based in Jackson Hole.

TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY WEST

3465 North Pines Way, Wilson, 83014 Wyoming

www.tayloepiggottgallery.com

17/12/23

Julia Bland @ Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole - "Embers" Exhibition

Julia Bland: Embers

Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole

14 December 2023 – 4 February 2024

JULIA BLAND

Long Alliance, 2023

Oil and burnt canvas on panel, 32 x 32 inches

JULIA BLAND

High Moon, 2022

Linen, cotton, and wool threads, canvas,

fabric dye, oil paint, 95 x 57 inches

JULIA BLAND

Love In The Endless Night, 2020

Hand-woven linen and wool textile,

hand dyed linen, linen and wool threads,

hand dyed blanket, wax, oil paint, 111 x 136 inches

TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY presents Embers, a solo exhibition of work by artist JULIA BLAND.

Julia Bland makes artworks that exist somewhere in the space between painting, sculpture, and tapestry. Her experimental process incorporates stitching, weaving, knotting, dying, and even burning her materials, creating sublime abstractions of geometric compositions. This exhibition, Julia Bland’s first at Tayloe Piggott Gallery, also features oil and canvas collages, as well as Bland’s drawings, which help her think through her ideas, functioning as a kind of map with different marks indicating the process or material she intends to engage. A digital catalog accompanies this exhibition with an essay by Glenn Adamson, which is excerpted below.

Early in Julia Bland’s career, after training as a painter at Rhode Island School of Design and before learning to weave, she spent time in Morocco, where she studied Islamic art and Sufism. As Glenn Adamson writes, “She absorbed the dense concentrations of pattern in people’s homes there, and for a time apprenticed herself to a carver of intricately decorated wooden doors. This saturation in craft reinforced experiences she’d had growing up in Palo Alto, California, where she had her first exposures to art through family friends who probably would qualify as flower children. One of them taught her how to make jewelry, and another gave her a loom that she still uses today.” Julia Bland incorporates her loom as one of many tools—alongside her trusty scissors, and, of course, her hands—to transform fabric into a transporting tableau. Julia Bland’s experience in Morocco has embedded itself in her work, which often contains intricate geometric patterns that recall ornate Islamic architecture and images of snakes, a sign of death and rebirth in Sufism. Other forms in her paint-tapestry hybrids, meanwhile, resemble the suspension bridges of New York—a reminder that majesty can come from the spiritual world, the natural world, and the urban world all the same.

Glenn Adamson observes, “The total effect is electrifying. Standing before the immense wall hanging, you are enmeshed in the internal oscillations of its “active surface” (to borrow a term from Op Art). The composition, while essentially symmetrical, is laced with tactical misalignments. Colors are usually reflected from one side to the other, but here and there, they shift unexpectedly. The work has the dynamic balance of a yin yang symbol, as if seen through a kaleidoscope.” Hints of familiar objects emerge through the layers of fabric and yarn. Adamson continues, “These multiple, elusive images are compacted within the pictorial field, much like the numerals in Jasper Johns’ celebrated 0 Through 9 series: a palimpsest of layers, with none taking precedence.”

Allusions to her process and remnants of her materials are always present in Julia Bland’s work. She observes that these vestiges “give you information about how the work came together. There are the technical and formal aspects of the technique, and then there is the social naming of it.” As Adamson observes, “Craft is typically encountered either as culturally-encoded, perhaps folkish, perhaps kitschy; conversely, it may be seen as a culturally-neutral modus operandi, simply a way of arriving at form. Julia Bland refuses this false opposition. When she uses a technique, she takes on its full range of association and potential, absorbing it whole. This is the impulse that drives her practice forward.”

JULIA BAND was born in Palo Alto, CA in 1986. She received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2008 and received her MFA from The Yale School of Art in 2012. She has been an artist in residence at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Lighthouse Works, The Sharpe-Walentas Space Program, and The Shandaken Project: Storm King. She has received awards including The Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship from Yaddo, The Carol Scholsberg Memorial Prize, NYFA/NYSCA fellowship in Craft/Sculpture, The Florence Leif Award for Excellence in Painting, and the Natasha And Jacques Gelman Travel Fellowship. Recent solo exhibitions include Derek Eller Gallery, New York, NY; Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL; Camille Obering Fine Art, Jackson, WY; The Lighthouse Works, Fisher’s Island, NY; Helena Anrather, New York, NY; and On Stellar Rays; New York, NY. Recent group exhibitions include The Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY; John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI; Chambers Fine Art, Beijing, China; and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, NY. She has been reviewed or featured in many publications, including The New York Times, Mousse Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail. Julia Bland lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY

62 South Glenwood Street, Jackson Hole, WY 83001

www.tayloepiggottgallery.com

09/12/23

Olive Ayhens @ Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole - "Secrets in Place" Exhibition

Olive Ayhens: Secrets in Place

Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole

14 December 2023 – 4 February 2024

OLIVE AYHENS

Yellowstone, 1994

Oil on canvas, 36 x 50 inches

OLIVE AYHENS

Bejeweling the Massif, 2009

Oil on linen, 30 ½ x 40 inches

OLIVE AYHENS

Outskirts of Roswell, 2014

Oil on canvas, 44 x 52 inches

TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY presents Secrets in Place, a solo exhibition of work by artist OLIVE AYHENS.

Secrets in Place, Olive Ayhens’s first exhibition at Tayloe Piggott Gallery, presents a selection of oil paintings and ink and watercolor works from the mid-1990s to the present. For the past forty years, Olive Ayhens has focused much of her practice on the creation of environmental allegories, each as whimsical as they are catastrophic, which fuse antithetical and imaginary worlds into "jumbled panoramas,” according to Hyperallergic's Stephen Maine. Her inventive contemporary landscapes amalgamate nature and man-made environments, creating implausible realms of juxtaposed skyscrapers perched on cliffsides on Northern California, as seen in Bejeweling the Massif (2009), or bustling traffic in a remote desert, as seen in Outskirts of Roswell (2014). Critic Jerry Saltz has described Olive Ayhens’s work as “intertwining postapocalyptic narratives and prelapsarian bliss… Part Bosch, part Coney Island of the mind’s eye, these works place us inside scenes of destruction as curious gods look into and down on widening worlds.”

Simultaneously collapsing and expanding, corkscrewing and unraveling, Olive Ayhens’s compositions evolve more or less autobiographically, taking from the many places where she has spent time, especially through the numerous residencies she has been awarded throughout her career. Olive Ayhens strives to capture an essence of each place she composes, reconceptualizing, distorting, and rebuilding these places from her memory, her subconscious and, most importantly, from her imagination. Olive Ayhens has taken care to deeply absorb the places she has spent time, as even her works featuring fragmented and amalgamated loci impart a profound and idiosyncratic sense of place. Her warping of space and place often imbues potent environmental implications into her works. Even so, in Olive Ayhens’s creations, as The New Yorker's Andrea K. Scott articulates, "whimsy tends to outstrip dread.”

Yellowstone (1994), The Torrent of Venus (1995) and Wyoming Toad (2010) reflect Olive Ayhens’s time spent in the American West teaching and participating in artists residencies, where she was moved by the monumental scale of nature in the Rocky Mountain region and the wondrous natural features that define it. Though the urbane does not creep into these works, each presents space in Olive Ayhens’s signature state of panoramic distortion that plays on the scale of the American West’s seemingly endless expanse. These works still offer moments of caprice, as in The Torrent of Venus, which features a spectral red petroglyph of a nude woman (“She is me,” Olive Ayhens reveals). The works of Secrets in Place span almost thirty years of Olive Ayhens’s career, and are united in their play on spatial organization and scale, as Olive Ayhens compresses and stretches uncanny realms into fantastical visions of improbable places.

Olive Ayhens upholds that her work is grounded in abstraction. She embraces the language and aesthetics of abstract painting in her focus on exploring color relationships, texture, scale, and the compression and expansion of space. Above all, Olive Ayhens is driven by her “love of the paint itself- with layering it, with building textures, et cetera.” Olive Ayhens has long been praised for her willingness to allow realism to dissolve into pure abstraction in her color-rich, kaleidoscopic works in which linear perspective is not utilized to anchor space, but rather to destabilize it.

OLIVE AYHENS was born in Oakland, California, and received both her BFA and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has exhibited her work widely throughout the United States and internationally. Olive Ayhens has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Pollock Krasner Foundation Award, and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant. She has completed residencies at Ucross, the Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program, MacDowell Colony, Fundación Valparaiso, the Salzburg Kunsterhaus, Yaddo Artist Residency, Djerassi Artist Residency, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Roswell Artist Residency, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, and at Schwandorf International, Bavaria. Today, Olive Ayhens lives and works in New York City.

TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY

62 South Glenwood Street, Jackson Hole, WY 83001

www.tayloepiggottgallery.com

25/10/23

Troy Passey @ Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole - Take This Longing

Troy Passey: Take This Longing

Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole

October 27 - December 3, 2023

TROY PASSEY

Remember, 2022

Graphite and acrylic on Bristol Vellum, 24 x 19 inches

TROY PASSEY

Take This Longing From My Tongue - Leonard Cohen II, 2019

Ink, ink wash, and acrylic on Neutech 25% cotton paper, 35 x 23 inches

TROY PASSEY

Beautawful

Neon, metal support, 9 ½ x 22 x 5 ½ inches

TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY presents Take This Longing, an exhibition of works by Boise-based artist TROY PASSEY.

Troy Passey is an interdisciplinary artist who merges idea and image in his text-based visual art. Take This Longing borrows its title from a Leonard Cohen song of the same name, and presents a selection of works on paper and neon light sculpture. These conceptual works are created through thoughtful, minimalist, and elemental compositions that utilize words as a visual–in addition to a written–language. In Troy Passey’s art, words operate in many ways; some become figurative, emerging as horizon lines or objects themselves, while others playfully name, or intuitively explain and narrate the objects drawn by Troy Passey.

Troy Passey grew up on a farm outside of Paris, Idaho, and was avid reader never without a pen or paper in his pocket. In these early years, he religiously jotted down quotes and ideas, ever-gathering what would later become his primary medium. Troy Passey always wanted to be a writer, but “would never call [himself] a writer because it was way too precious.” While studying English in college, Troy Passey also delved into art history and, later, when writing his master’s thesis on Andy Warhol, he came across words by Warhol which shifted the course of his career. “He said something that changed my life; he said, ‘People are often better at their second love than they are at their first love because you’re way too close to your first love, but, with your second love, you have some distance,’ so I changed my paradigm and called myself an artist.” His childhood habit of collecting texts, thoughts and words, and his appreciation of poetry and prose, unintentionally had been the consummate preparation for what would become his life’s work. Even today, this habit of second nature has become an integral part of Troy Passey’s artistic practice, as he continues to record the words and phrases that he encounters on a daily basis.

Although most often based on the scholarship of past writers, Troy Passey’s works are as physical and emotional as they are cerebral. A self-proclaimed “anti-calligrapher”, Troy Passey does not expect viewers to read the entirety of words he uses to build his works (which are often repetitions marked with an intensity that approaches asemic writing); rather, he hopes the works as a whole speak to people on an intuitive, elemental level, and considers the titles of the works to be the real texts to be read, crediting writers ranging from Emily Dickinson to Leonard Cohen, from Rainer Maria Rilke to Robert Frost, to The Cure. When speaking of his own work and life, Troy Passey yet turns to the words of others. “My work is not autobiographical, rather it is more reportage of the human condition. It’s kind of weird; the neon work is some of my most personal work in a way. Like “Beautawful” is almost like a Rosetta Stone for me. Joni Mitchell said, ‘Laughing and crying, you know it’s the same release,’ and I hope that my art is about that. That the world is really amazing and beautiful, but it can be awful too. You have to accept both.”

Today, Troy Passey lives, teaches, and works in Boise, Idaho. He attended Utah State University as an English major, with a minor in art history. In 1997, he graduated from Boise State University where he received master's in English. Troy Passey's art has been included in four Idaho Triennials. He was a recipient of an Idaho Commission on the Arts Fellowship, as well as an inaugural Artist in Residence, at the James Castle House in Boise, ID. Troy Passey has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout the American West, including at the Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID; Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson, WY; Boise Contemporary Theater, Boise, ID; Herrett Center, Twin Falls, ID; Eagle Performing Arts Center, Eagle, ID; Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Ketchum, ID; and the Ogle Gallery, Portland, OR. His work has also been shown in group shows in Jackson Hole, Los Angeles, Boise, Ketchum, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, and Miami, among other locations. In 2023, Troy Passey completed Is Where the Angels Are, four site-specific memorials to those lost during Covid-19 at St Alphonsus Medical Centers located in Boise, ID; Nampa, ID; Ontario, OR; and Baker City, OR. He also completed KITH & KIN, a collection of sculptures at the James Castle House.

TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY

62 South Glenwood Street, Jackson Hole,WY 83001

www.tayloepiggottgallery.com