Джон Грейд
ジョングレード

source: suyamaspaceorg

A graceful, if menacing, gray mass stretches across the ceiling from corner to corner. It is inspired by the artist’s explorations as resident artist at Ballenglen Foundation in County Mayo, Ireland. Grade imagined a view from below a bog, looking upward through magnified light-filled pores in layers of soaked peat. The installation suggests both weight and fragility, made from interlocking sections of cast paper pulp, glassine and cellulose that create a thin, puckered and drooping skin above one’s head. Catalogue, essay by Frances DeVuono.
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source: cynthia-reeves

John Grade uses his conceptually and visually compelling sculptures as vessels to explore the cycles of the natural world. Often, the artist creates these works while envisioning their degradation through the impact of the elements. Grade’s sculptures are built from a combination of traditional materials like wood, resin and clay paired with novel polymers like corn and potato based resins and binderless paper castings. His sculptures are often immersed for extended periods of time in tidal bays, the high desert, or snow-fields. Their slow decay is charted and documented via drawings, photographs, video and, ultimately, the transformed materials. Inspired by the erosion of the natural landscape, Grade hands over control of his art to this inevitable decomposition – a process that Grade describes as “an interesting conversation” between the landscape and the sculpture.

Capacitor, the newest work from Grade’s studio, is being unveiled at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin on April 16. Created with perforated fabric skins stretched over mechanically fastened wood frames, the sculpture mimics the soft movement of an oceanic organism. Its cell-like components are linked to weather patterns through sensors installed on the Center’s roof. As information about wind speed and air temperature are communicated to Capacitor, temperature changes dim or brighten the lights; shifting winds contract or expand the entire sculptural form, which opens and closes like a blooming flower. Grade’s team calculated statistical means based on local weather patterns over the past one hundred years and keyed the information into a control panel. Variance from recorded wind and temperature patterns determines how bright the sculpture will glow, and the degree to which the sculpture will open. The artist states, “The whole of the sculpture will appear to be very slowly breathing.”

Capacitor’s forms are inspired by coccolithophore, a one-celled marine plant that lives in the upper layers of the ocean. These photosynthesizing organisms are environmentally significant because they remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thus helping to cool the planet. Each fluted shape in the sculpture represents an individual organism; each cluster communicates specific information, as a visual manifestation of the weather patterns outside the museum walls.

Grade does not simply mimic shapes, forms, and textures of the natural world, he strives to decipher its “language.” In giving his work over to the elements —as an offering of sorts— he is inviting nature’s serendipitous information. It is a patient work; sculptures that languish in the elements require the artist to wait months, sometimes years, for a response. With Capacitor, however, the process of disintegration is removed, and the response from nature is immediate – weather made manifest as a captivating and wholly enveloping environment.
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source: johngrade

John Grade
Born: Minneapolis, 1970. Resides: Seattle.
Education: Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. (B.F.A., 1992)