Art Opening: Construct @ Foundry Vineyards

CONSTRUCT
Jenny Hyde and Cozette Phillips
Curated by Rachel Smith
February 1st- April 28th, 2019
Opening Reception February 1st, 2019 5pm-7pm

Construct features the work of artists’ Jenny Hyde and Cozette Phillips. Their individual studio practices focus on the integration of process and materials as a way to deconstruct and re-contextualize ideas surrounding the body, environment and everyday interactions. Like the word construct, an idea, object or experience can have multiple interpretations depending on the context. The multi-dimensional works presented within this exhibition position the viewer in a relationship of familiarity and obscurity simultaneously. The resulting unfamiliarity allows for a collective knowing as individuals reflect upon similarities and differences within their own histories and experiences.

Hyde’s recreations of common places, objects, and gestures through digital processes highlights the peculiarity and nuance of how they are remembered and experienced. The works on display focus on households, guns and performance as a means to explore the intricacies of American everyday life. The process for creating these works involve the use of digital scanners, cameras, and programs to document, record and methodically reconstruct the household scenes and guns to represent physical evidence of the rural American landscape. In the All-American gun series Hyde notes that the images, “question the cultural identity of Americans in different ways…[by] looking at the romanticized depiction of isolation or ‘independence,’” and adds an additional layer through the titles, which are culled from profiles on dating apps like Tinder, which aim to “give the objects human history and further examine the relationship between Americans and guns.”

Phillips’ sculptural works emphasize the environment and the contrast between its transient yet apparently permanent existence. The casting and fabrication techniques Phillips utilizes are motivated by a delicate and reflective combination of materials, processes and subject matter to examine the concepts of transformation and connectivity. Phillips’ transmutation of trees, birds, and human forms using resin, wood and metals, inexplicably interlaces symbol and subject into a singular experience. Pema Chödrön in her book The Places That Scare You exemplifies the fluidity of nature by stating, “Everything is in process. Everything – every tree, every blade of grass, all the animals, insects, human beings, buildings, the animate and the inanimate – always changing, moment to moment.”

Rachel Smith’s artwork and curatorial projects investigate the complexities of the individual and the collective as it relates to memory, processes, and materials. She has curated numerous exhibitions including: Desire Lines in collaboration with the Spokane Art’s event Saturate and Saranac Art Projects in Spokane, WA and Poetics of Place celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month and the Latinx community at Clyde and Mary Harris Gallery at Walla Walla University in College Place, WA. Her work is on permanent collection at the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction in Fort Worth, TX, Brooklyn Art Library in New York, and in numerous private collections. Smith received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Idaho and Bachelor of Art in Commercial Art from Walla Walla University. She currently maintains a studio practice in Walla Walla, WA and is an Assistant Professor of Art at Columbia Basin College in Pasco, WA.