Tony Moore “Sculpture Children Of Light”

Tony Moore “Sculpture Children Of Light”

Sideshow Gallery

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Sideshow Gallery presents the solo exhibition Tony Moore: Sculpture – Children Of Light.

Tony Moore is an English-American sculptor and painter represented in international museum collections including the Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Greenville Museum, Art Museum of the U. of Memphis and ASU Art Museum, US and the Yorkshire Museum and Derby Museum, UK.

He received a MFA in Sculpture from Yale University and is the recipient of prestigious awards, including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, CAPS Grant and Sally and Milton Avery Fellowship.

In 1998, after 25 years of making sculptures and paintings in New York City, Moore relocated his home and studio to the scenic Hudson River Valley near Cold Spring, Putnam County, NY (50 miles north of NYC) where on a mountain top property he built a spacious studio, gallery and Japanese style Anagama-Noborigama wood-fire kiln. His unique ceramic sculptures are fired in the kiln four times a year in weeklong communal events.
A recently published catalog on the artist’s work, TONY MOORE: SCULPTURE with essay by D. Dominick Lombardi, titled “A Prayer for the Souls in Purgatory”, will accompany the exhibition and is available for sale.

“What Tony Moore refers to as ‘the relationship of humanity and nature’, that magnificent mix of man and mother earth is at the core of his content. There is that sense of monumentality, that massiveness of told and untold history that we might feel, what Moore gathers in through direct experience, cognitive or corporeal, as he builds up and cuts away with and within his earthen clay is his expression.

Moore references in this exhibition an inspiring 1965 quote by Dr. Martin Luther King which states: ‘History will have to record the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the vitriolic words and other violent actions of the bad people but the appalling silence and indifference of the good people. Our generation will have to repent not only the words and acts of the children of darkness but also for the fears and apathy of the children of light’.

Everything has memory. Nothing exists outside the cycle of life, even as things change to previously unimagined heights or depths, especially with the current divisive and damaging political climate. Yet, despite the socio-political affront to Moore’s morals and beliefs his art is more about standing firm and undeterred by the insanity than it is a gut reaction to it. His art transcends the riffraff. It grounds us, and most importantly, it roots

Moore in his unflinching principles as he stokes the days’ long flame of his Anagama- Noborigama wood-fire kiln in the production of his thoughtful and inspiring works.’

In several, we see fragments of A Prayer for the Souls in Purgatory, which paints a very dark picture with phrases like ‘…let some drops of Thy Precious Blood fall upon the devouring flames…’ It also speaks of compassion, while the intensity of those same ‘devouring flames’ is a clear reference to the intense wood fire in Moore’s kiln. With both, we have a level of redemption suggested especially with the toil of creating, that 99 percent of perspiration that follows one percent of inspiration, which is often rewarded with a substantive art.
What is abundantly clear is Moore’s constant and unrelenting passion to create. He challenges the limits of his medium moving further and further into new territories and iconic symbols. Moore brings the earth and clay to a level of storytelling that is both ancient and forward-looking as he combines tangible and valuable substance with powerful forms and dynamic technique.”
Excerpts from the essay “A Prayer for the Souls in Purgatory” by D. Dominick Lombardi.

D. Dominick Lombardi is a visual artist, curator and writer. He has written for The New York Times, Huffington Post, Art Slant, Sculpture, d ’Art, Art Papers, Artnews, Art New England, NYArts Magazine, Art in Asia (S. Korea) and Public Art and Ecology (China). D. Dominick Lombardi’s art is represented by Kim Foster Gallery in New York and Prince Gallery in Copenhagen.

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