| Tyler Meadows Davis Sculptor |
Artist Colin Nesbit, whose subtle prints and sculpture have often dealt with issues involving history and ghosts, commented after seeing a
large group of these pieces that the exhibition seemed like a “sort of cemetery” in the sense that these pieces resemble grave markers,
homage to the experiences, choices, and even mistakes of some unspecified group of individuals. This reflects my religious beliefs
concerning the profound significance of the time we each have in mortality, that in fact, now is the time to:
Prepare to meet God; yea the day of this life is the day for men to perform their labors…after this day of life,
which is given us to prepare for eternity…cometh the night wherein there can be no labor performed.
The Book of Mormon, 295
The act of stacking the glass is significant in this respect, as it has direct associations with the way we make choices and accumulate life
experiences, one by one, over time. Encasing the stacks within openings in the steel forms, suspended motionless, suggests a completed
sentence, an experiential documentation of sorts that cannot be added to or taken from.
There is also something of a meditative nature in the process itself, the consistent repetition of stacking similar objects, with each piece
leaving an emerging pattern below while filling an increasingly narrow void of possibility. An integral part of this process, I have become
interested in the slight variations that unavoidably occur as a result of my own inconsistencies. Artist Magdalena Abakanowicz has dealt
with minute variations in her work and suggests “unrepeatability” is as inevitable in art making as it is in nature, she elaborates:
A crowd of people or birds, insects or leaves, is a mysterious assemblage of variants of a certain prototype, a
riddle of nature abhorrent to exact repetition or inability to produce it, just as a human hand can not repeat its
own gesture. Magdalena Abakanowicz. Marlboro Gallery. 17 Feb. 2006. http://www.abakanowicz.art.pl/documentation.html
Likewise, rather than attempting to mask the variations that inevitably occur in repeated forms, the Accumulation series explores their
subtleties. However similar in visual parameter, each piece is made unique, though sometimes only slightly, through variation in scale and
composition, as well as through a variety of surface treatments to both steel and glass, including cold lamination, sand blasting, kiln fusing
and casting at extreme temperatures, painting, sanding, and of course, oxidation.
Context