Cecille R. Hunt Gallery: Friday, 13 December 2013

John Watson: Materials

"Materials" opening exhibition is  on Friday December 13th from 6-8pm.

Working primarily with reclaimed wood, mostly salvaged from the cast-offs of trade and industry, building sites, or home remodeling projects, I build objects and installations that reference the spaces and places of our built environment. I am keenly interested in “make-do” structures built out of necessity with whatever is on hand—the shack built on the side of a landfill, the roughly mended shanty, scrap-wood birdhouses, cobbled together tree forts…

 In my work, I attempt to build along a fine line between structure and collapse, between the well made and the slapped together, between the cherished and neglected, and between success and failure. The work is at once playful and serious, animated and motionless, familiar and curious, autonomous and dependent.

 Materials represents a selection of sculptures and drawings created during the past year. Taken collectively, the body of work represents my interest in observing, collecting, and building. Taken individually, each piece stands as an example of my explorations of material, object, and space.  Whether they make direct reference to existing structures (as is the case with Monza, which interprets a famous section of a racecourse, or Sunlander, which takes cues from railroad tracks), or they are wholly new inventions (as in Amended, a product of collected observations and ideas, or Pagoda, a ramshackle take on a more refined architectural structure), each work recalls something of a familiar manmade mark on our landscape.

Cecille R. hunt Gallery at Webster University

8342 Big Bend Blvd.

St. Louis, MO 63119