Abstract
In the months leading up to Tory Fair’s latest show, Paperweight at VERY gallery, VERY director John Guthrie and I made two studio visits to view the work in progress. On the first occasion, I met John outside a large wooden building, an erstwhile printing press, and we tramped up the stairs to Fair’s studio to find her rearranging two sculptures. She had cast a tree in a mixture of rubber, plaster, clay, wax, and foam and they stood erect in the middle of the studio. On our next visit, the trees were lying on the ground, a cast of a tree stump had been added, and we all agreed that the campfire motif provided a strong sense of place and a conceptual anchor for the show.
Fair, a Boston-based artist and Associate Professor of Sculpture at Brandeis University, is very much a student of her own work. She allows her process to inform decisions and builds up materials only to later strip them away. In her more recent work, Fair uses personal keepsakes from her life to access memory and conjure up folk nostalgia. In 2015, Fair constructed an installation called Heap at Proof Gallery in Boston which consisted of an ashen mound of stacked objects. The pile contained casts of items taken from Fair’s everyday life and her past— a soccer ball, a mug, her grandmother’s camera, her son’s breakfast waffle. For Paperweight, Fair recycled some of these objects and infused them with her new pieces.
I met Fair at a local pub to discuss the evolution of her art and her personal growth as an artist. We talked about her formative years in the nineties working in the Arizona desert at the Roden Crater Project, a mammoth undertaking led by conceptual artist James Turrell that’s still in progress today. She also explained something called a “pseudomorph”. -- Stace Brandt