As Santa Fe says goodbye to the 150 folk artists from 54 countries around the world who sold a couple of million dollars of traditional crafts over the weekend at the International Folk Art Alliance’s annual market, the city’s Center for Contemporary Art is about to open an exhibition Tom Joyce’s work.
Joyce was a MacArthur recipient in 2003 who has studios in Santa Fe and Brussels. Tom Joyce: Everything at Hand opens July 28th at Santa Fe’s CCA:
Stretching from CCA’s Tank Garage to its new outdoor sculpture garden, the exhibition features new works by Joyce influenced by his many years of working with industrially forged remnants and byproducts of large scale manufacturing. In addition to forged and cast iron sculpture, the show highlights iron-inspired photography, video, charred drawings and mixed media installations, including experimental bodies of work in materials newly utilized by Joyce.
Tom Joyce: Everything at Hand builds on the artist’s decades-long interaction with iron, a metal at the earth’s core that is crucial to human survival. The exhibition illuminates Joyce’s ongoing experimentation with tools and technology, both at his home-based studios and at the state-of-the-art forging facility near Chicago where he has worked since 2003.
More than 250 million pounds of iron is forged monthly at the factory to create what Joyce describes as “the infrastructure at the heart of the mechanized world.” Working there with a team of expertly trained industrial blacksmiths, Joyce refashions the freshly-severed “offspring” into new works that express the indispensability of iron as both a natural and industrial product referencing the material’s political, environmental and historical impacts.
