Anna Sew Hoy: hook & eye

Karyn Lovegrove Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by Los Angeles-based sculptor, Anna Sew Hoy. In hook & eye, Sew Hoy continues to explore the boundaries between functional design, craft, and the notion of pure sculpture - this time pitting references to a practical household item, the hook, against notions of display and abstract form. Previously, Sew Hoy`s formal voyages into the world of domestic pragmatism have manifested as a line of products, Blacknoir, which includes such delicate but durable objets d`art as jewelry racks, vases, ashtrays, paperweights, and sundry containers. She has also created groups of talismanic sculptures called Dreamcatchers, and Scholar Rocks. Now, Sew Hoy fuses her “useful objects” into basic ceramic and fabric forms to create a critically complex set of sculptures that harness the tension implicit in an artist`s struggle to birth purposeful work. In this, Anna Sew Hoy asks the core question of why people make art, while relishing in the process herself. Initially generated through communal actions inherent to Sew Hoy`s practice, in which she salvages unwanted items from friends, the installation consists of thirteen ceramic wall hangings called "hooks" that surround Circuit, a sprawling, tendriled floor piece. Collectively, the pieces employ both readymade and constructed materials ranging from Circuit`s cast foam, stuffed and stitched black denim, and flocked logs, to the fired and glazed clay slabs upon which recycled clothing, gold chains, computer cords, and more dangle from the hooks recalling Sew Hoy`s earlier Dreamcatcher series. Each circular plaque, fired and glazed in earthy brown, black, and ochre tones, acquires its own personality as a fetish object by flaunting its phallic hook adorned with pop cultural debris ravaged, torn, and clawed by Sew Hoy`s animalistic material treatment. Issues of surface and texture are widely interpreted as soft clashes with hard, metallic with matte, while size, weight, and color are manipulated in odd ways that recall ancient cultural traditions and imminently contemporary environmental problems with consumer culture. The tactility of Sew Hoy`s works in hook & eye connotes the physical body, while her quest to invent new material combinations reflects a more abstract sense of figuration that is sexy, clunky, awkward, chic, chunky, and beautiful, colliding to invent a foxy visual lexicon. (Trinie Dalton) Anna Sew Hoy lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BFA from School of Visual Art, New York, NY, and will receive an MFA from Bard College in 2008. Sew Hoy’s work was most recently on view in “Eden’s Edge: Fifteen LA Artists” at the UCLA Hammer Museum. She has also been featured in exhibitions at the Asia Society, NY, the Yerba Buena Cutlural Center, San Francisco, CA, as well as in numerous gallery exhibitions in New York and Europe. She was a recipient of a 2006 United States Artist Fellowship.