Joan Robey

liz | June 23rd, 2010 | Artists | Comments Off on Joan Robey

ARTIST STATEMENT
My constructions are made from salvaged materials.  The very act of finding and choosing the elements I use is already part of the making process.  Although I am not really interested in a narrative element in my work, I do seek a rapport between the materials themselves.  Sometimes it is just to make the forms evocative and ask questions and other times it might be to present metaphor on the human condition.  There is a joy in interceding with a discarded object and breathing new life into it. This particular series began with my finding bent pieces of plywood at a neighborhood garage sale. I cut up the curved panels into wing-like shapes and the dialogue began.  I mounted the forms on plain plywood panels because I was drawn to the dryness of the surface and wanted the completed pieces to feel spare, somewhat isolated and temporary.

BIO
A mid-career artist, Joan Robey has re-invented herself through her art. Robey grew up in New York and earned a BFA in English from the University of Florida. She spent a number of years in the Bay Area studying and teaching woodworking. In the early 80s she relocated to Denver where she opened the Joan Robey Gallery. After settling in Santa Monica in the early 90s, she started creating assemblage and sculpture from salvaged materials.

Her work has been shown in galleries across the nation and collected by institutions including the Peter Norton Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art, Miami, and can be seen in the movie “Batman and Robin” and in numerous collections.

Robey’s artistic roots can be found in the California assemblage movement of the early 1960s, in particular, the poetic lyricism of George Herms. Drawn to the aged materiality of the found object Robey’s constructions employ the junk aesthetic of the early assemblage artists along with formal sculptural techniques, where a kinship is present with the works of Anthony Caro, Martin Puryear, and Catherine Burgess. Robey’s work falls into two categories; the first having a greater linear/painterly quality, poetic in nature and the second is more volumetric, depicting implied danger or chaos isolated in time and space.

Duality, the cornerstone of the conceptual framework of Joan Robey’s sculpture, is reinforced by the interplay between the positive and negative. Using salvaged materials such as discarded wood or metal, Robey’s constructions have the ability to evoke insight, awe, and humor. However, rather than narrative, this artist prefers dialogue. Even in the very act of finding and choosing materials, the form, condition, or surface of an object will “speak” to her. In turn, the resulting evocative works of art she creates ask questions rather than make statements. As metaphors for psychological situations, the use of discarded materials in her work suggests transformation, salvation, and transcendence.

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