CAVIN-MORRIS GALLERY

NOMADIC BODIES & STONE RIDGE ALCHEMY

OCTOBER 22 - NOVEMBER 28, 2009

Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to present the work of two artists: Lidia Syroka and Tim Rowan, who create in two vastly different mediums, but who are consummately joined at the soul. Lidia Syroka's drawings shown on the walls and Tim Rowan’s subtly monumental ceramic sculptures are displayed on the floor of the gallery.

Their subjects could not be more disparate. Syroka is out in the world as an artist wandering nomadic Asia; her drawings, as opposed to her previous mixed media weavings of paper and pigment, use the body as a highly aestheticized, and therefore a ritualized vehicle of growth and decay. The structure is spiritual and thus decay manifests as transformation. Her black ink and walnut stain drawings on hand-made Nepalese paper create stark scenarios of bio-organic 'transmutation' as the artist calls it, a sort of visual alchemy. The body’s structure receives the restless permutations of the souls meanderings.

Born in Poland in 1956 Syroka moved to Paris at age 25, and began collecting Art Brut. She traveled to Mongolia, Siberia, India, Pakistan and Nepal, Tibet and China. The intense visual and cultural impact of these travels gave her an implicit permission to explore common chords in her own work.

Tim Rowan embraces the nexus points of Home, Place, and the skeleton Earth itself. Though he studied with iconoclastic ceramic Master Ryuichi Kakurizaki in Japan, his use of clay still reflects a combination of Japanese respect for technique and his own presentation of clay as the alchemical bones of Place. If you visit Rowan's studio you will walk on the stone strewn grounds and soon realize that the differentiation between the sculptures he has placed all over the land and the natural formations offered up by the dark leaves piled ground itself have blurred.

The earth is also a body and decays. Clay and earth are the means to larger sculptural statement for Rowan. For this exhibition of mostly new pieces we chose from the broad spectrum he explored in firings this past summer, range from small to massive.

Both artists dissect inner and outer environments and tease the edges of what holds the earth and body together. Deconstruction helps realize a grander reconstruction. It is a human obsession to take the world apart and put it together again. These two powerful artists are no exception.