Opening Reception: This Saturday, October 19th, 3-5pm

Artist talk & book signing with Shana Nys Dambrot: October 26, 11am

Following his recent exhibition at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, legendary Venice sculptor Woods Davy will exhibit recent stone works challenging the forces of gravity and expectations of material identity. Discovering common ground with the observations of his ancestor, pioneering British chemist and inventor Sir Humphry Davy, on scientific inquiry as an aesthetic process in the early 19th century, Woods explores relationships between imagination and reality, emotion and structure.

“These sculptures offer entrance to an unfamiliar zone beyond gravity and the expectations of the natural world. As I contemplate these works, I feel a euphoric sense of tranquility, a feeling more important to me than the physical object. Emotion, as aesthetic experience, begins to transcend form.” – Woods Davy

Sir Humphry Davy saw the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius as a sublime aesthetic experience and studied the rough basalt rocks formed from the lava flows; for many years, Woods Davy has been similarly fascinated by the texture and purity of shape of oceanic, pillow basalt rocks—the result of lava rapidly cooling on all sides after underwater eruptions. Frequently, numerous tiny holes appear as the gas escapes. Davy has collected these pure, natural forms from the edge of the Pacific in Mexico for many years, but now has incorporated them to a greater degree in these new Cantamar series sculptures. His work is always a collaboration: the stones speak to him, he listens, then makes his moves. They start to float, weightless despite their heavy nature.

As Shana Nys Dambrot writes in Davy’s recent monograph: the “arc-like Cantamar assemblages echo the forms of the waves that originally shaped the rocks in the vast salty tumbler of the sea, allowing them to re-inhabit and radiate that heavy weightlessness. While it’s true that in their gentle lightness the stones deny their own molecular properties and the natural behavior of matter. But in those same wafting sweeps they remember and recount that at home in the sea, they are as light as feathers.”

There will be a book signing of the new Woods Davy monograph by Shana Nys Dambrot, including a preface by Susanne Muchnic and an interview with Craig Krull, at the artists’ talks on October 26.