Echoes, Ripples and Buzzed Whispers
design by Kelsey Dusenka
FJORD Gallery is pleased to announce Echoes, Ripples and Buzzed Whispers featuring work by Sachiko Akiyama and Trevor King. The exhibition is curated by Chrissy Scolaro and will be on view March 1-April 12. The opening reception will be Saturday, March 1 from 6-9pm.
Echoes, Ripples and Buzzed Whispers brings together two artists whose works embody visualizations of “the life of the mind,” a phrase uttered by John Goodman’s character, Charlie Meadows, in the 1991 Coen brothers film, Barton Fink.
Meadows shouts, “I’ll show you the life of the mind!” in a moment of carnage. Our interior psychological spaces are rife with both the romance of Whitman (as referenced in the show title, sourced from Song of Myself, Leaves of Grass) as well as uninhibited turmoil, exemplified by Meadows.
The phrase attempts to categorize the complexities of being human, from the depths of desires and feelings, to the greatest beliefs and winged possibilities. In Akiyama’s and King’s works, this seemingly impossible feat is approached through sculptures that simultaneously, against the odds of their desirous and psychologically complex content, emit calm and reverence. Focusing on a use of clay and wood, the works lead us to question limitations, or lack thereof, in our collective physical and mental spaces.
King’s ceramic stoneware Human Man, a figure who towers at nearly seven feet, casts a gentle look of awe and admiration. Attached to his right leg is a fragment of a walking stick. Appendages like branches, legs like tree trunks. The suspended off cut leads us to consider physical mortality and vulnerability–breakage, truncation, divisions and simultaneously, an ability to persist and thrive–floating, fastening, buoyancy. Nearby, Akiyama’s Reach, is in dialogue; an arm is disconnected, yet unbothered and relaxed. In our contemplation of this work, its stillness and inaction is questioned.
Akiyama offers a spectrum of impactful reflections on existence, both physically and spiritually. In the three larger works presented, we experience a variety of mindsets. In both Carried and Waking Dream, Akiyama’s figures are engaged with symbolic elements of nature and environment, proposing psychological spaces. Is the figure in Carried independent and fearless or isolated and hopeless? Serendipitously, in the viewing of Between, a work that celebrates a multiplicity of readings, the viewer is again challenged to accept a lack of binary interpretation.
About the Artists:
Sachiko Akiyama (b.1973) received her MFA from Boston University and continued her studies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Akiyama has had solo exhibitions at Brattleboro Museum (Brattleboro, VT) and Tracey Morgan Gallery (Asheville, NC). Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Mrs Gallery (Queens, NY), the CMCA (Rockland, ME) and in a collaboration between Dunes Gallery (Portland, ME) and Night Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). Among numerous honors, Akiyama was awarded a Joan Mitchell Fellowship, an Artist Resource Trust Grant, and residencies at Millay Arts and Ucross.
Trevor King lives and works in New York City. King received a BFA from Slippery Rock University. During this time, he also studied in the Sculpture and Intermedia departments at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland. Trevor received an MFA from the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan in 2015. He has been an artist-in-residence at MASS MoCA, Touchstone Center for Crafts, Ox Bow School of Art, Haystack Mountain School, Sculpture Space NYC, Greenwich House Pottery, and The Hambidge Center. King has been a Fellow at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Articles on his work have been published in CFile, Floræ, Maake Magazine, and Sculpture Magazine. Solo exhibitions of King’s work include Projections at Art Lot (2022), Notions at Concept Gallery(2022), Notions at Sculpture Space NYC (2018), and STILLNESSNESS at the Emmanuel Barbault Gallery (2018). Group Exhibitions include: Crucible at Spencer Brownstone Gallery (2022), Bronx Calling at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.