Please join us Sunday November 22th at 3pm for an artist talk with Sayumi Yokouchi in support of her exhibition Landscape: Absence is Present.

Sayumi’s recents work deals with finding a unique balance between real and artificial beauty. Influenced by her urban Japanese upbringing where man-made constructed nature was prevalent, this body of work explores “natural” as a theme both conceptually and physically.

Working with white thermoplastic Sayumi creates pieces that appear delicate to handle but are physically quite strong. Sayumi elevates the plastic out of its original utilitarian context and extends  its functionality as a non-traditional jewelry material.

From the artist:

“My five senses are a great part of my process. I find comfort in the excitement that comes when all my senses are connected with the objects I am making, and wish to share these same feelings with others through my objects.

Only through making do I become more aware of the material and my ability to connect with it. By this point in the process, the original form is nearly unrecognizable. I prefer to isolate the material I work with to seek a balance between unexpected natural beauty and artificial beauty. This isolation is not about less, but sometime less is more meaningful. Simplicity becomes a strategic tool for the process of making to comfort my own intrinsic complexities. “

Sayumi Yokouchi

Bruce Metcalf
Sin and Sensuality
Sunday Oct 18, 3pm

Please join us for an artist talk with studio jeweler Bruce Metcalf. This talk is held in conjunction with Metcalf’s solo exhibition Sin and Sensuality opening on October 17 at Gallery Loupe.

Jewelry, sex, and sensuality have been conjoined since the dawn of civilization. The oldest recorded human jewelry is more than 110,000 years old. It’s drilled nassarius shells, some of them colored with red ochre. Those shells are similar to the cowrie, which is still used for ornament on several continents. Both the nassarius and the cowrie have a slot-like opening in an oval shell, resembling nothing so much as female genitalia. It doesn’t take too much imagination to realize that this very early jewelry was about fecundity and all the manifestations of human sexual desire.

Things haven’t changed much in 100 millennia. Jewelry is still about sex and desire. Engagement rings and wedding rings speak of sexual exclusivity, after all. Even male jewelry like military medals and ribbons speak of manliness and virility. But these images are coded and abstracted, so nobody has to face the facts directly. Jewelry lets us raise the subject of sex without mentioning it.

As for sensuality, what could be more sensual than the glow of gold and the sparkle of diamonds? While contemporary jewelers might reject the symbolism of preciousness, the seductive appeal of classic jewelry materials is undeniable.

What I propose is that those two ancient subjects, sex and sensuality, can be repurposed for the 21st century. The imagery must be familiar, but it can’t be traditional. And it must be coded, just like it always was. To depict plain phalluses and breasts would be too much like pornography: blunt and unpoetic.

There needs to be a certain amount of displacement. A distance, but not too much. So I offer clefts and blossoms, navels and seeds, antlers and leaves. These images may seem innocuous at first. But upon consideration, it will become obvious that some of them are reproductive in nature, like flowers and fruits. Others are abstractions of genitalia, like clefts and seeds. My imagery, indirect and suggestive, creates a potent tension with the veiled subject.

My goal is to make jewelry that is beautiful, sexy, and sometimes a little disturbing. Like a dark, handsome man in a beautiful suit and long, black hair. Or a voluptuous woman, with parted lips and half-closed eyes, gazing at you from across a smoky room.

-Bruce Metcalf

FOUND AT…MADE IN…
Rian de Jong
Artist Talk Sunday Oct. 4, 3pm

Please join us in welcoming Dutch sculptor-jeweler Rian de Jong for an artist talk in support of her current solo exhibition Found at… Made in…, now on view at Gallery Loupe.

The peripatetic de Jong divides her time between her home city of Amsterdam, The Netherlands and the rest of the world, which she sails around in the house boat, sometimes remaining at an exotic locale for extended periods of time. In fact, place and the processes of necessity inform her diverse practice. She is notable for incorporating elements obtained during her travels with rough, electroformed copper, semi-precious stones, glass or ceramic, fabricating jewelry within a tiny shower stall and counter area on board the Lyra. Encountering terrible weather in Patagonia during March 2014, de Jong and Herman [her partner] were sequestered for eleven days on the boat, within a cave along the Straits of Magellan, awaiting favorable sailing conditions, when she began Found at… Made in….. As with most of de Jong’s series’, Found at… Made in… is an excellent example of “Arte Relacional” (relational art), where content depends mostly upon context, or as de Jong puts it “working on location…en-route [and] on the move.”

-Gallery Loupe 

Please join us on Sunday, September 20, at 3pm for an artist talk by Ruta Reifen & Jorge Manilla in support of their joint exhibition, BHLO: a duet.

An art jewelry exhibition featuring Ruta Reifen’s Floralforever (pardesim) and Jorge Manillla’s Impossible to imaginecollections. Two unique botanical explorations, abstract and figurative. Both stories of a human’s relationship to their environment, one philosophical and the other a particular narrative. Presented together, as a duet, a dance, these bodies of work employ floral forms as cultural symbols, personal and universal.

Ruta Reifen, born in Jerusalem, Israel, 1984. Received an honors B.Design in Jewelry Design from Shenkar College of Engineering and Design (Israel) 2009. In 2011 she received and honors MFA from the Jewelry + Metals department at the Rhode Island School of Design (United States).

Ruta keeps her own studio practice in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Her fine jewelry sells in selected boutique stores across the US and Europe. Ruta’s practice is based on an expertise of artisanal goldsmith techniques, design skills, and an academic background in jewelry, art history, and contemporary art.

Each piece is individually handmade by the artist in Brooklyn, using responsibly sourced metals and stones, ensuring a commitment to the highest quality craftsmanship as well as minimal environmental impact.

“As a maker, jewelry presents endless opportunities to form intimacy through a wearable piece of art. These jewels are symbols of the splendor and romance I find in flowers, also the most immediate material for self-adornment since ancient times. Floral forms relate directly to the wearer, the exchange between us is personal with every piece I create. ”

Jorge Manilla, the son of a family of Mexican goldsmiths and engravers, studied visual arts at the Academy of San Carlos, in Mexico. He received a highly technical jewellery training at the Academy of Craft and Design from the Mexican Institute of Fine Arts. But it was until he moved to Belgium, years later, where he enrolled at the Karel de Grote Academy in Antwerp, that he was forced to forget about the traditional notion he had to jewellery, to let his technical skills aside and to research about the cultural meaning of jewellery, its conceptual possibilities and to experiment with materials and techniques .

Manilla’s vast production, is both utterly beautiful and profoundly upsetting. Attraction, repulsion, uneasiness: his work confronts him with his religious upbringing and the viewer with a powerful and intimate perception of the syncretic religion of the modern Mexico. Allusions to religious images and iconography that show the often tortuous and painful relations that Mexicans have with their faith. Wood, bones, textile, branded leather and silver are amalgamated and transformed into almost recognizable shapes: a probable anatomical part, a series of tiny bundles that could be small babies, an unknown religious utensil. Manilla is not shy to experiment with all kinds of materials and processes, never leaving aside his extraordinary metalsmithing skills. Each one of his pieces is carefully crafted in a variety of processes that are able to convey his rotund ideas.

Please join us for this special visit with Estela Saez on Saturday August 29th at 2pm. Saez will be presenting her jewelry, travels, and her position as the artistic director at The Design Studio by Azza Fahmy in Egypt.

A Catalan maker and educator, Estela Saez’s oeuvre spans the last eighteen years. Her contraptions include colourful fabric bladders suspended below or above black metal containers, or fragile prosthetic scaffolds made of cardboard. All look rather tattered and beautifully heroic, and although occasionally wearable, pay scant notice to the body: they derive their evocative power from their distance to the ground, not the skin. Yet, while sculptural, her repertory of shapes continues to be homebound and proportionate to the hand: Saez belongs to a relatively small group of makers whose practice is guided by the dual nature of contemporary jewellery, both sculptural and wearable.

Educated at Massana School in Barcelona, Saez received the Massana Award in 2001. Later, she became the Studio assistant of Professor Ruudt Peters in Amsterdam from 2005 to 2007 while developing her own projects and collaborating with the Peters.  Estela Saez was the winner of the Talente Prize in 2006 Munich. She has been invited as a guest teacher and lecturer worldwide. Saez has exhibited her works since 1996 in galleries and museums around the world, receiving various incentive grants to promote and develop her personal work. Her pieces have been published in different magazines, catalogues and specialized books of jewellery and of other disciplines. Since 2005, she has been home based in Amsterdam and works internationally.

Currently Estela Saez is leading The Design Studio by Azza Fahmy in Cairo, Egypt.

Bettina Speckner will be giving a lecture Sunday Afternoon, August 16th at 3pm In the Gallery at Brooklyn Metal Works. Speckner is giving this talk in support of “Things of This World Keeping Their Difficult Balance” an exhibition of new work on view at Sienna Patti.

Bettina Speckner was born in 1962 in Offenburg/Germany. From 1984 to 1992 she studied at the Academy of Fine Art in Munich, first studying Painting with Prof. H. Sauerbruch until 1986 when she began to study Jewellery in the department of Prof. H. Jünger and in 1991 with Prof. O. Künzli.

Since 1995, Speckner has worked as a freelance artist. She exhibits and gives lectures and workshops in different countries, such as Japan, Finland, Estonia, France, Australia, and the US amongst others. She has received many awards and accolades for her work including the prestigious Herbert Hoffmann Prize, the Prize of the State of Bavaria and commendations for the Danner Prize. Her work is in numerous international private and public collections.

Simon Cottrell will be giving a lecture Tuesday evening June 30th at 7pm In the Gallery at Brooklyn Metal Works. Cottrell is giving this talk in support of “Timbre” an exhibition of new work on view at Sienna Patti.

The specific combination of qualities within a sound that distinguishes it from other sounds of the same pitch and volume is its ‘timbre’. While my works are tangible and far less transient than any sound can ever be, this term which defines the inherent small differences within similarities seems more than apt to apply. The ongoing and slowly shifting use of certain preset parameters with only a singular material and an achromatic palette, has become my formal language. Working within this sameness seems to be leading me to focus more closely on the possible variances within those systems of working, and heightens my sensitivity to relationships between tiny details within one piece or across past works.

After almost 20 years of working within the realm of jewellery, the incremental shifts between works are becoming increasingly minuscule. I have no need to hurry or progress in leaps and bounds. Each piece, is conceived primarily for an existence in collaborating with a wearer towards their communication of self. From a wearers perspective, prior relationships between other earlier works of mine are insignificant.

As ever my work retains a decisive avoidance of direct allusions or clearly resolved representation. This is not so much by thorough pre-planning, rather by only allowing coy suggestions of subjects to repeatedly rise in a responsive and intuitive process of making, and then continuing countering those subjects. The result usually evokes something between anything and nothing. 

Simon Cottrell is an Australian artist based in Canberra. In 1996 he completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts, with Honours in Gold and Silversmithing at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). In 2005 he was awarded an RMIT University Scholarship for a Master of Arts by Research. He has been teaching since 2001 and is currently a Lecturer and Researcher at the Australian National University, and has also been invited to teaching workshops, giving seminars and lectures at institutions around the world. Since 1996 he has exhibited extensively in over 120 exhibitions, in Australia, New Zealand, Germany, USA, Japan, The Netherlands, UK, Malaysia, France, Thailand, Canada, Italy, India, Spain and China.

The October 2013 issue Metalsmith magazine published a feature article on the work and practice of Simon Cottrell, written by Marjorie Simon.

Artist Talk May 17th, 2pm

Please join us for an artist talk with Timothy Veske-McMahon for an in depth look into his artistic practice and processes. mirror milk with be on display in the gallery where the talk will be held.

New Works by Timothy Veske-McMahon
mirror milk
On view April 18 – May 26

mirror milk is an exhibition of new works by artist and contemporary jeweler Timothy Veske-McMahon. These wearable works are drawn from fundamental needs—of communication, of relationships, of the home—to create basic elements of a visual lexicon representing the delicate balance of adult life. The resultant logograms combine and bloat into objecthood. 

The artist’s studio practice is divergent with repurposed materials minted through repetitious hours at the workbench as well as virtual objects that blink into existence. Dimensional forms are wrapped and layered with imagery through the culturally competing techniques of marbling and hydrographic printing. These pieces investigate shifts from graphic two-dimensional signifiers to patterned sculptural forms, drawing inspiration from specific geographies and personal spaces.

From the artist:

We seek out and delve into mirrors for clarifying affirmation but, in truth, are met with a foreign body.  This inversion captures and takes hold of our sense of familiarity, slyly perpetuating an alienating sense of self. The operative mechanism remains true beyond the literal geometry of optics. We likewise define ourselves through (co)observational analogs, assuming a universal perception that naïvely forgoes the parallax between viewing the same object from different positions. We assume: a boy is like a boy, a marriage is like a marriage, and hunger is like hunger.

This perceived closeness of similarity and familiarity is a deception. A fictitious shorthand we use in identifying ourselves within society and relationships. If definition is a loss of information, is it possible create a loss-less object?

Timothy Veske-McMahon