Hammer Time

November 14 - December 19, 2020

press release

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Hammer Time, an exhibition of new sculptures by Ian L.C. Swordy, the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery. 

With a series of stone and woodworking traditions from the ancient world to American tramp art, self-compiled at his disposal, Ian L.C. Swordy filters his work through a ragged sieve of relentless and confrontational performativity. Here, a would-be motley crew of sculptural techniques unify under punk’s lasting entreaty to its adherents: find a guitar first, then figure out how to play it. Anchored by a longstanding conceptual practice that deemphasized the object and leaned toward feats of athletic resolve and endurance–culminating in his walk across America from New Haven to Venice Beach– Swordy considers materials’ relationship to time, labor, and durability. A sense of operative temporality persists; his sculptural objects, like his performances, suggest a triangular relationship between artist, viewer, and artwork, with duration connecting them all. 

New to carving both stone and wood, Swordy’s point of entry into both traditions remains, by design and necessity, primeval and intuitive. Get a band together first, then learn to play. Marble and alabaster cats, structurally and materially diverse, perch on carved wooden bases, mediated by found slabs of stone or concrete; they typically enjoy the company of a bird, while one owl, largest in stature, finds itself wrapped tightly by a snake. A particularly regal, upright cat in veiny grey marble protects a less defined companion nestled into a shelf in the wooden base. The stone is by turns almost supernaturally glowing, owing to ceaseless hand sanding, deeply opaque and highly polished, or rough-hewn and matte. Swordy’s materials, as broad as they are specific, connect his freestanding sculptures with his wall works, assemblages created from accumulative detritus gathered along the artist’s daily walks in New York. 

Indeed, Swordy’s instinct to make art from encounter extends its mandate to include historical epochs and folk wisdoms in addition to found objects, and announces itself in abrupt and irregular transitions between wood, stone, concrete, and metal. Sculptures make repeated reference to prehistoric amulets, Egyptian cats, Cycladic figures, American log carvings, tramp art furniture, and the work of Constantin Brancusi. Still, they present more as allegories of reckoning, physical and otherwise, than they do as art-historically bound collage; recordings of a practice, molted and freed from a skepticism of the permanence inherent to the art object. Swordy’s carved totems trace life as lived through and as art; continuous evolution over time produces an aesthetic distillate that rolls itself up with lived experience. 

Swordy’s approach to art making, much like his approach to life, centers around doing and the attendant need to challenge oneself, often and with clear eyes. Guided by DIY ethos, the artist wills his way to an art centered around time, experience, accumulation, and material, while being resolutely permanent. Performance, now a guiding hand as opposed to an unbreakable oath, opens itself to include the repeated hammer strike, radial sandpaper rub, and inevitable chisel slip. His works’ patent nakedness reveals inner glows, and speaks to the shadows of histories–both art and personal. In learning to play his instrument(s), Swordy’s philosophy finds a physical body.

 
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