September 3 - 29, 2022
From Archway Gallery:
“Archway Gallery presents Found & Made, featuring new sculptures by Damon Thomas, on view September 3-29, 2022. The artist will be present at the opening reception on Saturday, September 10 and will talk about his work at 6:30 p.m. He will give another Artist Talk at the gallery on Saturday, September 24, at 2:00 p.m., in conjunction with a workshop he will be teaching on found object sculpture at The Center for Centering of Houston. The Artist Talk will be free and open to the public, as well as to the workshop participants.
While Thomas is best-known for his figurative sculptures, there will hardly be a face visible in Found & Made. Instead, Thomas spent most of 2022 focusing on the beauty and fragility of the natural world. The figure is still present in this exhibition though, as many pieces employ natural and found objects as stand-ins to explore the human condition.
In Rise, for example, a ladder made from a deconstructed antique crutch floats in between a pair of wings. For Thomas, the piece is about transcendence. “Remaking the crutch, a marker of infirmity, into a ladder, a symbol of rising above, was one of my favorite moments in the many months I spent making the work for this show,” Thomas says.
Several pieces in the show reference kintsugi, the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery using lacquer mixed with gold dust. This process highlights the repairs, rather than trying to hide them. In doing so, it embraces the Japanese philosophy of finding beauty in broken things.
The largest piece, Kintsugi Trees, is a pair of slender, birch-like trees that have been cut apart and rejoined with gold leaf calling attention to the rejoined limbs. “I’ve long fantasized about being able to mend a cut-down tree and bring it back to life,” Thomas explains. “’That power is beyond any of us, but art can suggest rebirth and hopefully inspire us to save old trees and plant new ones.”
Another sculpture with a Japanese reference is Barn with Moon, an ode to 17th-century poet Mizuta Masahide. This 9-foot-tall sculpture is Thomas’ visual interpretation of Masahide’s famous haiku, “Barn’s burnt down, now I can see the moon.”
While this exhibition represents a temporary departure from the human figure for Thomas, another form he is often associated with – the crow – appears in several pieces. “The crow is such an old soul and spirit messenger symbol; he fits in very well with the theme of this show.””
Reception: September 10, 2022 | 5–8 pm
2305-A Dunlavy
Houston, 77006 TX
(713) 522-2409
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