Jacqueline Metheny: Observations

On view at 511 Gallery

April 18 — July 24, 2024

511 Gallery is pleased to present Jacqueline Metheny: Observations,

which will open on Thursday, April 18th.

511 Gallery is pleased to present Jacqueline Metheny: Observations by Jacqueline Metheny, which will open on Thursday, April 18th.

Observations is a solo exhibition of the artist’s sculptures that reflect on the “structure- seeing” of patterns and systems in found, human-made objects and in nature. Eleven three-dimensional artworks include large platform-based, metal constructions, wall works of brass wire, binder clips, and other variant industrial materials, and four small cast cement sculptures that incorporate pieces of machinery and well-used implements from a distant past. Metheny draws on her visual observation of the patterns, systems, and thrusts in both simple and complex structures in the physical environment and also on her learned experiences working with machine-made industrial and consumer products in her process of making.

The ultimate shape of a Metheny sculpture derives not from a set idea of what the final form should look like but rather from what emerges from piecing together the parts of a structure in accordance with available materials plus an inherent mathematical or systemic composition derived from the combining of those materials. In the end, the result is not unlike the process of “making” a piece of music or understanding and treating a part of the human anatomy.

Peak is a silvery grey vertical form, 27 inches in height, comprised of bright pieces of aluminum screens sewn together, as if a quilt, and placed on a platform of wood with aluminum tubing legs that raise the object to eye level. Though as viewers we recognize the shape (or perhaps just its outline) of a mountain, a work of nature and so-called natural forces, Peak seems to have its own inner thrust and energy. It does not imitate the motion of the physical world but rather mirrors its matrices and sequences through the prism of the systems of complex structures that are present in abstracted math as well as in environmental forms such as the petals on a flower and the spirals on a seashell. Jacqueline Metheny’s sculptures are made from discarded machine-made objects which, combined by the artist’s hand, are transformed into visual shapes that give evidence of the living forms in the physical landscape. “A system unifies the piece, but it is the perception of that unity, not the system, which is prominent,” wrote one art reviewer many years ago about the Specific Objects made by Donald Judd. No better description fits the remarkable and powerful objects made by Jacqueline Metheny.

Jacqueline Metheny, was born in West Virginia, raised in the Midwest, and received her BFA from Southern Illinois University and her MFA from Hunter College, in New York City. She now lives and makes work in her studio in Hartford, Connecticut, where she has also taught 3-D Design and Sculpture at the University of Connecticut and Trinity College, among other educational institutions. The artist’s sculptures have been widely exhibited throughout the U.S. and abroad, the latter most notably in New Delhi and Madras, India; and site-specific works by Metheny have been commissioned for landscapes as varied as the East 4 th Street Community Garden in Brooklyn, New York, and writer Edith Wharton’s Estate and Gardens, “The Mount”, now a U.S. National Historic Landmark, in Lenox, Massachusetts.