Years in the making, the exhibition will feature woven wall hangings, jewelry as sculpture, and sculpture as jewelry. Drawn to civilization’s refuse, both Myranda and Grandpa George find beauty in the commonplace, each gifted with the alchemist’s touch. Their shared history is clear and shared vision undeniable.
When Grandpa George began his work in the Fifties, America was well into a Golden Age of Consumerism. Madison Avenue was King and the measure of a man’s worth was his stuff. The natural by-product of stuff is more stuff and consequently the streets of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York were awash in debris. George Herms and his peers mined the sidewalks and dustbins for the building blocks of their work. Just as George pieced together his poetry from the odd yet perfect word, he did the same with his sculpture recycling beauty and meaning from America’s castoffs.
Following in her Grandfather’s footsteps, Granddaughter Myranda Gillies seeks the extraordinary in the ordinary. Exploring the streets and bodegas near her Brooklyn home, Gillies sources both man-made and natural fibers along with strands of plant life. Pineapple fronds, lemon grass, sugar cane, plastic mono-filiment and commercially dyed fibers all find their way to her loom. Beyond the plastic mono-filiment and commercial fibers, the natural elements are all cultivated and imported from faraway lands, sourced to satisfy a community that hungers for a taste of home. In weaving a portrait of her New York block, Gillies has woven a much wider and far more inclusive web, a picture of our contemporary American life.
The exhibition will also feature a special selection of jewelry designed by Gillies using rusty metal scraps - Herms sculptural discards, along with pearls, dyed silk tubing, and cut metal.
MYRANDA GILLIES lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She holds her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Gillies has exhibited in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Portland.
GEORGE HERMS (1935) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Herms’ work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; and the Museum of Modern Art, NYC. He has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Sculpture; the Prix de Rome Fellowship in Sculpture from the American Academy in Rome; the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award; and was a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute. His work is included in collections at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Menil Collection, Houston, TX; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA.
