2017 Best of Show:
Schuyler Dawson, Ways of Seeing: The Things I thought I Knew
JCC Center GALLERY | September 21- October 26, 2018
Schuyler Dawson, Ways of Seeing: The Things I thought I Knew
JCC Center GALLERY | September 21- October 26, 2018
In 2017, Schuyler Dawson was named Best of Show winner of the Southern Tier Biennial. Sixty-two artists entered more than 165 pieces of work for the juried competition. Dawson's work was chosen from the 50 accepted artists by two prestigious members of the Western New York art community: Thomas Paquette of the Crary Gallery Board of Directors in Warren, PA and Tullis Johnson curator and manager of archives at the Burchfield Penney Art Center.
Statement from Schuyler Dawson
My artistic practice is an exploration in ways of seeing, of finding meaning in the mundane, of finding value in the debased. In my sculptures I have been explore the creation of tension and balance between found objects. I am attracted to old broken objects: rusty trinkets, rotten lumber, fallen branches, peculiar rocks. In my studio, I examine how to present these objects I am fascinated with in a way that highlights and strengthens their curious nature to the viewer. There is a moment of empathy for me in the struggle of these discarded objects; the exploration of found objects led me to the question of how I can use the visual language of the old and the discarded as a metaphor for anxieties and struggles of our own conscious existences. If I can place an old branch or a broken watch in a situation where the viewer pauses to empathize with these objects, objects that in any other context may be considered passable junk, then perhaps the viewer can find some significant meaning in some of the seemingly inconsequential aspects of their own lives. To generate these opportunities for empathy I utilize found lumber as the framework for systems of balance and tension. For instance, balancing a 14-foot-long, old wooden board on a single post, then using rope tied between a broken knife and a counterweight to create a system or moment of precarious equilibrium. From these systems and moments, the question then arises: how can various materials function as objects of weight and how can those weights create opportunities for moments of empathy or understanding of a struggle? I began with more functional (although broken) readymade objects (knives, watches, and stones to name a few) and moved onto casting my own weights out of concrete. Using concrete as a weight to pull against the found objects allows the viewer to directly understand the weight and tension created by the concrete at the end of a rope. In a complementary vein, my photographs explore themes of mystery and wonder in the everyday and the debased. I abstract old, broken materials until they become microcosms of fantasy, allowing us to project in wonder our own meanings and realities onto them. Both practices are an examination of ways of looking at the world and an attempt to find wonder in unlikely places. |
Exhibition Introduction by the Jurors
Schuyler Dawson’s Ode to Adolescence is a work that is both simple and complex. At first glance it seems to stand quit erect, like the obelisk monument to George Washington on the National Mall in the nation’s capital. The phallic protuberance that makes up the top half of the work seems to be both a giant pencil and the branch or trunk of a tree, yet the bright, almost ultramarine blue coloration suggests something more. The bottom half of the piece, made up of overlapping layers of a sagging, primary colored substance that is reminiscent of playdoh, takes on a more figurative form. Adolescence is on display here, with the soft amorphous, multicolored base firmly grounding the work and giving it balance. The simple, sharp and direct upper half of the work, juts out into the world suggesting the tools of the artist trade. The work suggests many of the complex and difficult realities of adolescence and youth, but on a more basic level it is simply beautiful to behold.
- Tullis Johnson |
Among many strong contenders for top prizes in the 2017 Southern Tier Biennial, Schuyler Dawson's Ode to Adolescence quite literally stood out. Colorfully commanding the space around it, it could hardly go unnoticed; but that is not what makes a top prize winner.
At first glance it appears to be a giant blue pencil perched on a stack of colored discs, or a solitary wooden birthday candle atop an alien's cupcake. Looking longer, I came to see Ode as a monument to the triumph of focus over chaos. Pine two-by-fours (unglamorous and unadorned) form the sculpture's utilitarian base. It supports a blue, then a yellow, frostinglike ooze that seems to be made of plasticine or Play-Doh—that malleable toy of childhood. Atop this ooze rises more plasticine, now layered in thin stripes of primary yellow, red, and blue. These pancake-stack layers—or rather more accurately, these syruped layers, for the colors are saccharine-sweet and well suited to a child's palate and palette—swell to form a bumpy, amorphously pupating body, rising upward from its base. The emerging shape tapers a bit before abruptly morphing into a rigid column that consists of a young tree trunk painted plasticine blue. The apex of the wood column is sharpened to a fine pencil-like point , revealing its inner woodenness. Compelled by the primacy of color and this sharpened "pencil," I am reminded how, when I was young, I was lured to the little shop where, week after week, I would spend my newspaper-route earnings on special colored pencils, purchased one at a time. But Ode to Adolescence is compelling in its metaphor as well as in its playful harkening to childhood. It perfectly embodies the transitions from amorphous, directionless play to honed purpose, and speaks not just of youth evolving, but to all creative endeavors. In a way it could speak for all the works submitted for this exhibition. It is a sort of sculptural creation myth for the arts, wordless and without influencing gods. It portrays an ambition rising from a functional but bland substrate (the two-by-four base), which then strives colorfully upward through a bumpy chrysalis stage to become pointed and skyward-aimed: the path of all ambition. It should be noted that Ode comes full circle, too, as its finely polished apex is wood—the very substance of the original base. Perhaps through all that color, it was always wood, now more pointedly so. -Thomas Paquette |