Abstract
VERY presents Paperweight, new work by Boston-based artist and Associate Professor of Sculpture at Brandeis University Tory Fair. Fair’s numerous accolades include a B.A. in Sculpture and Religion from Harvard University, a four-year stint working on the immense Roden Crater Project headed by James Turrell in the Arizona desert, and an M.F.A in Painting/Printmaking from the Massachusetts College of Art. Since graduating Mass Art in 1997, Fair has shown nationally and internationally in numerous exhibitions notably at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, the Worcester Art Museum, Kate Werble Gallery, New York, The Leroy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University, New York, and LaMontagne Gallery, Boston. She has received many grants including support from the LEF Foundation, The Pollock Krasner Foundation and The Joan Mitchell Foundation.
Fair’s work is human and grounded. In her 2015 show, Heap, at Boston’s Proof Gallery, Fair sited a large pile of crusty and unpolished cast concrete and rubber objects on the floor. The ashen mound had the aesthetic of rubble and contained numerous keepsakes cast and altered from Fair’s life including her grandmother’s camera, her son’s frozen breakfast waffles, and a soccer ball.
Paperweight reincarnates and progresses themes that emerged in Heap as Fair meditates on her relationship to nature and the past. She continues to embed her objects with tokens from her daily life, creating gateways to memory and personal history. Like fossils, the presence of found objects within the work allude to the artist’s fascination with geology, folk art, and material narratives.
Fair’s interest in liminal spaces leads her to disrupt conventional processes. Rubber, resin, plaster, and wax morph into each other. Found field stones and crystals sprout unexpectedly out of paper. The result is a collection of sculptural work that speak the language of materials and drawing. Fair brings us into the realm of nostalgia and sparks narratives by creating a sense of place specific to VERY.