your gaze

source: tmagazineblogsnytimes
The artist Anna Sew Hoy most often works with fabric and clay, materials usually associated with craft and handiwork, and yet the sculptures she makes are more tough than homespun. Sew Hoy began working with clay in a figure sculpting class in high school, long before she knew she wanted to be an artist, and she is interested in exploring, and playing with, its material properties. She builds her pieces from solid blocks of clay that she takes great pleasure in slapping and smacking to create the off-kilter shapes she prefers. Faceted orbs, large looped pieces that she calls buckles and textured ceramic pieces with holes that recall a hair-covered face with only the eyes showing (think Cousin Itt from the Addams Family) are some of the forms she’s been working with recently.
Anna Sew Hoy Anna Sew Hoy often works with fabric and ceramic as in this recent sculpture entitled “his jeans.”
The apertures or holes in Sew Hoy’s work both create space and frame it, and she likes the resulting nooks and crannies that let the eye travel and see things in new ways. Fascinated by contrasts, she has made some of her hard ceramic pieces soft by wrapping them in fabric skins — often made from jeans stripped of everything but their seams, hems, zipper and waistband — or giving them a velvety flocked surface.
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source: vsfla

Deciding to live/work is like jumping headfirst into the void. Will you get anything done at all, or ever go out again? Long mornings are spent alone. You eat lunch at 10:30, or 2:45, have two lunches, or none at all. You sit on the bench, watch the clock, and wait for an idea. You wait for your assistant to come wedge the clay, as you check your phone. Does answering email in bed count as work?

Familiar objects loom large as you pace the room. The whole world is compressed to the studio. Repeated images are: the snarl of cords from the desktop to the power strip; your work clothes in a pile; the empty tissue box; your cluttered worktable. This is your universe, and you are a shuttle, blasted into space, processing from above. You caress your laptop with constant fingering, and your fingers also leave prints in the clay.

When you stare into space is there thought? Images and information enter through your pupils. Where do they go after that? Often nowhere, but sometimes the information comes back, after being digested and transformed. The orb sculptures are not large eyes, but models for rooms where you can take a break from all this. There’s nothing Cartesian about them, thus the workday does not exist here.

Life can be a beach if you let it.

Various Small Fires is very pleased to present Home Office.

Anna Sew Hoy (b. 1976 in Auckland, New Zealand, lives and works in Los Angeles) received her MFA in 2008 from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. Sew Hoy’s work has been exhibited at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Aspen Art Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA); the Asia Society, New York; the Orange County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD); Salon 94, New York; and Greater LA, New York. She has had solo exhibitions at LAXART, Los Angeles; Sikkema, Jenkins & Co., New York; Renwick Gallery, New York; and the San Jose Museum of Art. Sew Hoy has been reviewed on numerous occasions by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Artforum.