Notes from a Zoom crit today with the equally amazing Kimberly Brooks and Edward Goldman.
Kimberly Brooks: Joy Ray is a Hawaiian artist and she makes sculpture. She sews together paper and cloth and…
Edward Goldman: And it’s embroidered.
Kimberly Brooks: Yes, and it’s got embroidery. And she just had an incredible installation in an art space in Hawaii where she was responding to the pandemic and the curve of it going up, and she created a whole installation where you can see visually the shape of the graph but in sculpture form. Her works are very arresting.
Edward Goldman: It tells a story which is bigger than the piece. I like to say that sometimes artists, especially well known artists at the big galleries, have to make large scale paintings. Large scale sculpture and paintings will grab your attention by the size, but when you see one thousand soldiers on parade, it’s like just their size. But to see one soldier, one actor on the stage holding your attention, that’s the art and message. I like this because it’s for me a letter. You remember I was a little bit criticizing too many words in one painting that you showed me. Here I read these lines like a musical score. Or letters in a medieval manuscript. And it allows me to stop and to write some, and to hear her voice, my voice. This is a very sophisticated work. And you know what, knowing the artist is from Hawaii, I would expect it to have such bright colors and preference. And to have this kind of Nordic…
Kimberly Brooks: Very well put. I love the idea of interpreting it as some kind of manuscript. She also creates this sense of decay with sand and paint, so it looks like it’s been affected by the environment intentionally, and she does it so well. Every artist is fascinated by this but she just nails it.
Edward Goldman: Working at the Hermitage Museum there is a huge collection of ancient art, a thousand years old to twentieth century, Matisse and Picasso. I remember sometimes holding in my hands an Egyption papyrus or medieval manuscripts, done not on paper but on the skin of animals. This kind of work makes me want to touch it with my hands. There is something….I don’t know, the knowledge of classical art by this particular artist. Somehow I feel text and books influencing her. Not just that she reads books but she loves to hold books in her hands. It’s a good manuscript.
Kimberly Brooks: You’re exactly right.
Edward Goldman: Joy, it’s a joy to look at your work.