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New Works by John Grade

John Grade

New Works

May 8-30, 2009

This exhibition of new work by Seattle artist John Grade presents graphite and charcoal drawings, photographs, sculpture, installation pieces, and his recent work in lithography. These works connect ongoing projects first introduced at Grade’s 2008 Bellevue Arts Museum survey with upcoming exhibitions and installations scheduled in the U.S. (Seattle, San Francisco, New York), France and England. Through these various media, Grade explores material realms of transition. The works document the fleeting moments between two formal states and the agents of transformation that make these changes occur: water, wind, insects, sand, the sun, and the body.

The exhibition will feature an installation in which Grade has cast hundreds of lips of family members, friends, associates and acquaintances. The lighting on the piece shifts from the front to the back, illuminating it in different ways to reveal changing textural surfaces and transforming the literal realism to virtual abstraction. At first, the viewer might only focus on the details of the individual lips, then, surmises the criterion for inclusion. After spending time with the piece, allowing for the light changes, the viewer sees the surface undulate like a landscape, suggesting a surface much like the slot canyons the artist has frequently included in his work. Gradually the viewer may lose all sense of anything literal and will only see the abstract patterns and shapes the changing light creates.

The artist hopes that the shifting perception from literal to abstract will encourage the viewer to look for similar transformations in the rest of the work. What appears abstract becomes recognizable and specific to the viewer’s understanding. Drawings that may at first appear to be only abstract patterns and forms can morph into maps or diagrams.

Grade received his BFA from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. This is his seventh solo exhibition at Davidson Galleries. The artist has had two solo museum exhibitions, in 2004 at the Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID and in 2008 at the Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, WA. Grade has received numerous award, and artist residencies. Many of the drawings in this exhibition were begun earlier this 2009 during a residency at the Macdowell Colony in New Hampshire and during site visits to Utah, Nevada and locations in England.

• Previous exhibitions: Cleave, May/June 2007; Underset: Small Drawings & Sculpture , November/December 2004

Please note: This page is an exhibition archive. View available works by Grade.