Ayla Tavares and Beatrice Modisett tackle time divergently.  

Modisett’s recent work on display mines campfires to take form. Salvaged from the dead fires of camping excursions outside the city, these remnants yield sooty, painting-like works, the compositions framed by blackened, bunched-up sticks of wood. Within, wonderfully crude charcoal marks on pigment-covered paper surfaces render abstract forms. Modisett carefully collects debris from each trip to incorporate into her compositions. There’s a simultaneous evocation of the protective fire and the dead, cool air that later surrounds the black remains in the morning light the day after a blaze fulfilled its task. Here, time is quick; after the fire is set, it is gone.

By contrast, Tavares conjures slower intervals. These ceramic sculptures have rough, sandy surfaces with graphite drawings in small vignettes atop them, evoking wavy, patterned hieroglyphics on the artist’s terms. While her pieces have taken various sizes, the work in her Materia materia series is smaller, each about the width of an open palm, and appears unearthed from a fictional yet deeply human civilization from centuries ago. But looking closely, these objects are remarkably contemporary through their topological manipulations into exquisite forms. There are many rich shapes waving out of the wall, and each relief offers distinct pleasures. The select drawings on the sculptures continue the undulating cosmology of form, pulling the viewer into these brief and mysterious moments.

Stories told around campfires have been preserved for thousands of years, indicating their generative possibilities to foster permanence, while, despite our best efforts, ceramics will inevitably break, even over the course of hundreds of years or instantly by a clumsy hand. Each work explores labor-intensive processes with the artist’s hand, further elevating its personal nature as a mediation of the world. Fire hardens shape in Tavares’s sculptures, while flames destroyed material for Modisett to salvage. Although this seems opposed, there is a compulsion to erect something new and to build from ruin, both of which converge on the goal of preservation.

There is thus a generosity in showing Modisett and Tavares together as they both remind us of how materials can be used so differently to solidify personal narratives and experiences, even as they do not guarantee their persistence. Approaching things with divergent methods doesn’t mean pursuing different results, but you can relish in these artists’ material juxtapositions. The flaky, ashen surfaces of Modisett’s compositions are antithetical to the rough, plum black solidity of Tavares’s reliefs; however, matter still comes together to offer a range of possibilities for the ever-present probing of time and feelings.

Courtesy of Bryan Martin