NYAB Event - Jim Toia "At the Mercy of the Gate"

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At Kim Foster Gallery
Media: Drawing, Sculpture

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Jim Toia had just spent two exhausting, brutally hot weeks in the Rio Grande Valley. He and assistant Anna Raupp, were casting ant colonies using a portable, home made foundry to melt and pour pewter into ant holes in the loamy, hard scrabble soil of south Texas. Toward the end of this extraordinary adventure in art making, he found himself in rural Mexico, unexpectedly trapped behind a locked gate and being menaced by a drunken local who threatened to cut his throat. Toia remembers, “I was struck by my response. Instead of fear, a rage unlike any I had ever had overcame me. This man was threatening my life and my response was a stark willingness to kill rather than be killed.”
The recanting above is not your usual introduction to a new body of work. However, it does evoke the raw, unpredictable quality often encountered by those of us who seek to expose nature’s underlying processes and structures especially on its own terms. Indeed, Toia might be found pouring pewter into an ant hole, staining a spider’s web for the taking, plucking jellyfish from the breaking surf, or positioning mushrooms on toothy paper while waiting for spores to drop. His process of art making is replete with a closeness to “le corps physique” of nature and reminds us continually that volition starts in the body and emotional reactions are instantaneous and automatic.

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