Du Chau: Through the Garden

October 07 - November 14,2023

From Erin Cluley Gallery: "Suggesting the natural design of foliage, Du Chau’s new ceramic installations and bronze sculpture recall in form and concept personal intersections of memory and herbal remedy. Through repeating porcelain forms, hung individually by silver piano wire, his work moves its parts towards unification; however, if not purposefully, Chau’s work rarely breaks its habit for abstraction and shapelessness. Through the Garden anchors this habit in references to fruit, herbs, and berries of special significance to his relationship with his parents as well as his Vietnamese heritage.   Most of Chau’s work utilizes simple porcelain forms reproduced, with slight variation, through mold-making and slip-cast techniques, where a mold is filled, allowed to solidify a consistent outer layer then emptied. While the color of memory is white according to Chau, ceramics glazed with deep hues of blue and green float soft bursts of red, orange, and yellow. Piano wire allows Chau’s porcelain to droop freely from the wall, while some works rest on the floor or pedestals, imitating patterns observable in nature.   In this new body of work, Chau broadens his material interests to include cast bronze. Often, the subject of these forms, sometimes representational, sometimes not, relate to or complicate the memory attached to a particular work. The great care Chau takes to create (and recreate) a single form confers a profound meditation on the texture memory takes in sculpture.   In Through the Garden, Chau’s porcelain forms imitate natural remedies grown and harvested from his mother’s garden when he was a child. Plants imported from Vietnam, where Chau was born and left in 1981, were used as medicine and nourishment for the young artist; later, when Chau’s father entered hospice care, the artist made drinks with bitter melon and other plants he first discovered from his mother’s garden. Recreated in porcelain, Chau gives permanence to the nostalgia within these organic forms. Capable of conjuring recessed memories in the artist and viewers alike, Chau’s newest work extends a career-long exploration of the affective strength in sculpture and our contemplation of its form.   Through the Garden will be Du Chau’s first solo exhibition with Erin Cluley Gallery. He had a solo exhibition at Cluley Projects in 2021."

Reception: October 14, 2023 | 4-7 pm

Artist talk: November 02, 2023 | 5-6 pm

Erin Cluley Gallery 150 Manufacturing Street, Suite 210
Dallas , Texas 75212
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