Kiff slemmons biography of barack
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My progression has been more about the flow of ideas.”
In that respect Slemmons’s recent pendants have their closest connections to bodies of work produced for the exhibitions “Cuts and Repose” (1998) and “Re:Pair and Imperfection” (2004-5). They were tools but you couldn’t help but see that they had slipped over into something else, that when the makers were making them they saw them as beautiful in some way, so they kept them and didn’t use them.
Not only did some of those early examples incorporate ancient stone beads from Mexico but they also made use of simple bezels fashioned with the same set of hand tools that grace her bench today. In these and countless other instances across human history the reuse of antiquities as adornments was clearly more than expedient.
“I decided that these were another kind of found material,” Slemmons explains. By giving a prominent place in her pendants to ancient stone artifacts and restraining her contributions to a complementary status, Slemmons is clearly less intent on emphasizing her own mastery of materials than on asserting that humans have always sought a better way—a more efficient technology and a more pleasing aesthetic—even millennia ago when their efforts were by necessity directed principally to the task of staying alive.
“The retrospection embodied by Slemmons’s new series is really twofold, since it is as much about looking back over her own career as about prying secrets of the early days of human history from the craftsmanship exhibited by ancient stone tools.”
Through her use of ancient objects Slemmons courts controversy in this period of heightened concern for preserving cultural patrimony, but her practice is not without substantial precedent in the long history of jewelrymaking.
The exhibition title references not only how each piece is crafted bead by bead through a process of collaboration, but also how Slemmons creates a body of work and views the individual pieces as forming one conceptual whole in their totality.
Slemmons, widely-acclaimed for her metal-based jewelry practice, has transferred her decades-long experience and understanding of jewelry’s potential to paper.
Everything is about what is new and now. Despite her initial trepidation, Slemmons accepted his offer and she has been working with the cooperative ever since. She recalls, “When I realized that their preciousness depended on their identity and that this identity had already been lost, abandoned, the possibility for a new presence eased my reluctance and I began to look at the hands to see what they said.”
Kiff Slemmons: Collective Presence
August 11, 2018
Artist Talk, 4pm
Opening Reception, 5pm
Paper is the site of poetry,
of drawing
and in the case of jewelry,
the unexpected site of both.
-Kiff Slemmons
An exhibition of paper jewelry by Kiff Slemmons executed during her residencies at Taller Arte Papel in Oaxaca, Mexico.
For Slemmons these objects without context have lost something valuable that, though not restorable, might at least be partly replaced. In 1962 she enrolled in Scripps College in Claremont, California for comparative literature. “I was taken with the points themselves, the refinement in making them, and the fact that they were handmade things. Since paper has been a serendipitous medium for the artist to pursue, her investigations have resulted in striking and visually arresting works of beauty.
In 2000, Slemmons was invited by pioneering Mexican artist and advocate Francisco Toledo to collaborate with Taller Arte Papel of Oaxaca, a paper-making cooperative founded in 1998 by Toledo to invigorate the local economy via artistic practices.
We don’t honor our ancestors much these days.
Kiff Slemmons 37.5
KIFF SLEMMONS’S TOOLS, gathered together here, were housed in a machinist’s toolbox for display. “In some ways I was distressed to find that I seemed to be making things similar to when I first started,” she admits, “but I tried not to linger on that too long.
Her intention was to make the viewer question the nature of imperfection and contemplate the new meaning of unconventional repair.
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They were tools made by hand that at some point slipped partly from necessity to ceremony.”The retrospection embodied by Slemmons’s new series is really twofold, since it is as much about looking back over her own career as about prying secrets of the early days of human history from the craftsmanship exhibited by ancient stone tools.
Another series of works that question worth and value was the much talked-about "Re:Pair and Imperfection." In the process of preparing the series, she asked some of her peers to give her pieces that are unfinished because they are unwanted or somehow flawed. She rejects the traditional valuation of jewelry based on the materials used, focusing instead on the ideas that go into each piece.
In her exhibition "The Thought of Things," Slemmons made jewelry that used parts of aged photographs, rulers, typewriters, and other found objects in order to elicit a direct personal response.