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Ordinary Alchemy | Hayoon Jay Lee, Doug Navarra & Xuewu Zheng
January 13 @ 12:00 pm - February 25 @ 5:00 pm
The Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild is pleased to present Ordinary Alchemy, an exhibition of site-specific installations and wall works by Hayoon Jay Lee and Xuewu Zheng, and altered antiques by Doug Navarra at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts.
Curated by Emilie Houssart, Ordinary Alchemy opens on Saturday, January 13th, 2024, and runs through Sunday, February 25th. The opening reception is on Saturday, January 20, 2024, from 4:00 – 6:00 pm, with artist talks and a performance by Hayoon Jay Lee at 4.30 pm.
The three artists in this exhibit present works based on the processing of mundane cultural ephemera: printed papers, grains of rice, vintage documents, and rusted old tools. These humble, utilitarian materials are transmuted with extraordinary care and labor into unfamiliar forms that command new attention.
Hayoon Jay Lee uses grains of rice to weave together narratives of thriving and inequity in daily human histories around the globe. Exquisitely configured in mass, Lee’s works call us to be present with opposing forces in tension: need and abundance, striving and fulfillment, connected in the fragility and power of basic daily nourishment.
Doug Navarra cultivates relationships with found historical documents and objects connected with the daily working lives of the past. Navarra’s responses honor these unique, everyday artifacts and their associated workers – simultaneously decommissioning the objects with new layers illuminating the distance between a past world and our own.
Through deep and ongoing meditative labor, Xuewu Zheng works everyday found objects into forms embedded with vast quantities of social data. His source materials, which include international newspapers, religious texts, and fast food receipts, are reformed through small, repetitive actions into massive post-legible archives that recall burial mounds, trash piles; ancient scrolls, and food mats.
The Kleinert/James Center for the Arts is open Friday – Sunday, 12 -5 pm or by appointment. Exhibition runs from January 13 – February 25, 2024, with an artists’ reception on Saturday. January 20, 4:00 – 6:00 PM. More info: https://bit.ly/ordinaryalchemy