Reception & Artist Talk- Grace Sachi Troxell: Potato Séance

Come join us for the reception and the artist talk of out first exhibition of the school year -- Grace Sachi Troxell: Potato Séance. The reception will begin at 5pm in Hartnett Gallery accompanied by snacks and the artist talk will take place in Gowen Room at 6pm. You will get to meet and talk to artist about her approach and her artist journey.

Potato Séance, is composed of sculptures in various states of growth and decay. The pulp from juiced carrots — with turmeric, lemon, and cayenne — covers Carrot Ginger Elixir, to help it heal from inflammation. Harvested local moss — mixed with buttermilk — wraps around Untitled (Moss), in hopes of living on a new environment. Three heads sprout from Untitled (Sunflowers), with turnip-like cysts bursting from its body, mimicking germination; dried lion’s mane is sewn into a crown that adorns one of the heads, accompanied by 10-foot-tall sunflowers grown in my community garden plot last summer, which have died and dried up.

Throughout the sculptures in this exhibition, there is a sense of fraught entanglement resulting from unexpected material collisions and collaborations as well as forms morphing into one another and coexisting according to different timescales. The other sculptures play with devices of hybridity through revealing and concealing their interior and exterior materials.

These sculptures are robust, but to human scale. They take their form from vessels, but quickly diverge as they are made with steel rod armatures and a skin of clay on top of that. Within the sculptures there are rectangular plinths secretly and not so secretly acting as the physical cores. Fire Baby and Venus Ovulating are the only salt fired sculptures in the group. Similar to a belly button or kiln, Fire Baby is the origin story for the rest of the sculptures. The chartreuse is a mason stain mixed with frit, but the variations come from mica, avocado pits, cabbage, banana peels, one week’s worth of compost, as well as salt forming a bumpy clear “glaze” over the shell. This juxtaposition gestures toward a noncontinuous sense of time, one in which industrial and organic materials are learning to be at peace with each other and rely on one another.

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