Kelcy Chase Folsom
Jason Reed
With
September 2–October 1, 2023
Opening reception Saturday, September 2, 3–5 PM
Artist discussion Saturday, September 23 at 3 PM
With provides intensity from every angle. Heavily sculptural and installation-based works by Kelcy Chase Folsom and Jason Reed, take the viewer on an evocative journey through our senses. There is humor, sadness, comfort, and darkness with familiar and unfamiliar triggers throughout. There is a deep sense of vulnerability to this show and a tactfully poetic grace to the work within it. In the words of Kelcy Chase Folsom, “We are most vulnerable when we eat, shit, or fuck.” One might add that we are also most vulnerable when we allow ourselves the chance to be so.
Kelcy Chase Folsom, Hot Seat (Toilet Bench 2), 2017, maple plywood, filler, and automotive paint, 60 x 31 x 18 inches
Kelcy Chase Folsom
Material language and my romantic unfoldings are the foundation of my work. Over the past five years, I’ve used the relationship between Earth and Moon as momentum in my own fictitious musings of “what if’s” or “what will never be”. Ceramic material is forever and I often avoid it, using newspaper pulp instead; it offers a seemingly more ephemeral quality, a parallel to what it is to be human. However, in my new body of work, I've become more fixated on the permanence of ideas once they leave the body. Like words, one cannot shape their reception. Ceramics enunciate a kind of intention and specificity that cannot be undone. It is alarming and relieving, similar to love.
Kelcy Chase Folsom (b. 1983, Atlanta, GA) received his MFA in Ceramics from the University of Colorado Boulder and his BFA from Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA. He has exhibited his work in over fifty exhibitions nationally and internationally and mounted his ninth solo exhibition last year. He has been a resident artist at numerous residencies including the Center for Ceramics in Berlin, Germany, The Hambidge Center in Rabun Gap, GA, and The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, PA. In 2015, he was awarded the Turner Teaching Fellowship at New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. He has taught at Maryland Institute College of Art, The George Washington University, Corcoran College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, and Virginia Commonwealth University. Currently, he teaches Adjunct at New Jersey City University. He lives and works in Kingston, NY, where he is the co-owner/director of Headstone Gallery and Headstone Ceramics.
Jason Reed, Anonymous Portrait: Mother Father, 2023, mattress, sheet, restaurant plates, wood, steel, powder-coated steel, mirrors, theater lights, wine, and whiskey, 84 x 44 x 120 inches
Jason Reed
Collateral Beauty is the “beauty that lies within” the area of Collateral Damage. I use the concept of Collateral Beauty as an emotional compass. It can be based on an experience, and by mining that emotional action, I find there is beauty to be discovered. Love, Time, Death. These concepts connect all single human beings’ thoughts and memories. I decode the encrypted emotional experiences and use the information to make pieces to show beauty in darkness. I use any material or medium under my creative process to give a voice to Collateral Beauty in relationship with time, death, and love in the pieces.
Jason Reed received his BA from San Francisco State. The focus was images and writings on photographs that centered on the emotional levels of friends’ personal lives. Color became part of the medium mixed with words on the photographs which led to a crossover to painting and three-dimensional work. A move from San Francisco, CA, to Brooklyn, NY, where Jason became part of the early artistic community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
A group show at Artists Space expanded Jason’s personal and social angst in materials that gave a contemporary dissent voice to the work. Other shows followed—White Columns, Real Art Ways, Exit Art, Grey Art Gallery NYU, Pierogi Gallery, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Ronald Feldman, New Museum Benefit Show, and others. Taking time to focus on other creative mediums, Jason returned to the studio after a long bout with cancer. His new work focuses on Collateral Beauty, an emotional observation that finds beauty within darkness. With an expanded array of emotional materials, Jason is presenting a new show of work at the Turley Gallery in September 2023.
Installation photography by Spencer House Studio