Exhibited: H - Z: Jedediah Morfit

This new body of work emerges from a number of different, but related, sources. First, a personal reaction against contemporary sculpture’s indifference to craft, allergy to narrative, and short cultural memory. Second, a fascination with the possibilities of modular sculpture. Third, a reverence for beautifully designed, beautifully rendered objects. And fourth, a magpie love for comic books, advertising, and all forms of visual seduction and play.

The elements that make up this body of work are, for the most part, developed individually, without practical or narrative connections. The majority of the work comes together for the first time here, on the wall.

Because the work responds directly to the space, no two installations are ever the same. This means that the groupings that become the "pieces" are more of a concept than they are fixed objects. Three ladies in a line with wheelbarrows will always be "The Price Of Doing Business", but what they carry is never the same.

My thinking here is very much influenced by my early training as a printmaker, particularly as a printer at The Electric Factory in San Francisco. There I watched artists like Timothy Cummings and Deborah Barrett create edition variée; drawing and painting on top of digitally produced multiples to create a series of unique, but fundamentally related, images.

This sense of visual play, and restless re-invention, finds a sculptural parallel in Kid Robot’s Dunny dolls. It is a particular kind of inquiry that happens within borders, within a given form. At it’s best, it is like a surprising cover of a familiar song, or an old play restaged in way that uncovers new meaning, new possibilities.

As a sculptor, I have always been attracted to the traditions of the genre. I have “re-staged” bronze busts so that they pounded their foreheads through the wall, and made waterless fountains. In this project I have re-staged bas-relief, lifting the figures from the frieze, and allowing them to move, change, interact.

As for the big, obvious question – what does it mean – there isn’t an easy answer. In my experience, artists are the often the wrong people to ask about their work. Whatever I thought I knew about what I was making has turned out to be only half-true, or simply wrong. I know that what has emerged is not a single narrative, but images from an uncomfortably bleak, and surprisingly religious, worldview. These are dark, religious, stories wrapped in jokes, crude violence, and absurdities. Enjoy!

Jedediah Morfit has a B.A. from Connecticut College in Religious Studies and Fine Arts and a M.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design in Sculptures. He has shown at various institutions and galleries including Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh, PA; Maryland Art Place, Baltimore, MD; and Stripeman Gallery, Brooklyn, NY.