The Museum of Fine Art Boston Presents Jedediah Caesar. Soft Structures, an exhibition on view through April 1, 2012, in the Edward H. Linde Gallery (Gallery 168) in the Museum‟s new Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art.
Jedediah Caesar Museum of Fine Art Boston
Los Angeles-based artist Jedediah Caesar debuts new work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), in the exhibition Jedediah Caesar: Soft Structures. Featured is his most complex and expansive installation to date of 177 colorful panels across five gallery walls, which surround a nearly one-ton solid white clay sculpture made on site using materials sourced from the environs of Boston.
The exhibition continues an annual series of MFA exhibitions focusing on graduates of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) of the past decade whose work has achieved international acclaim. Caesar is a 1998 graduate of the SMFA. The exhibition is presented with generous support from The Contemporaries.
“Caesar‟s tactile works seem to magnetically draw visitors of all ages to unexpected corners and vantage points of the newly renovated Edward H. Linde Gallery, offering new perspectives and moments of discovery,” said Edward Saywell, chair, Linde Family Wing
and head of Contemporary Art and MFA Programs. “His presentation here in Boston reaffirms the MFA‟s commitment to showing the most exciting work being created today.”
To make his 177 wall panels for the MFA, Caesar scoured California roadsides, desert geode beds, and the remains of wildfires near his home in Los Angeles, collecting, compressing, and casting his finds in colored resin that are sliced into thin panels, averaging 1⁄2-inch thick. His creative process enables him, as he explains, “to look at a place and chop it up to see its potential.” Caesar scans horizons for patterns, seeking signs that suggest networks of language, hidden history, and personal discovery. Inspired by items whose function is no longer certain and whose value is in flux—lone out-of-place cobblestones, a Halloween pumpkin long past the holiday season, a flat tennis ball far from a court—he gathers them as a dense assembly of ambiguity, only to slice it open.
The result is a pattern of cross-sections of sometimes recognizable forms seen in progressions and rhythms that guide us to scan or read their configuration, almost like a language. These distinctive panel sculptures, ranging in color from bright orange and milky yellow to inky blue and soft avocado, climb or descend the walls in stacks of checkered grids, irregular ziggurats, or continuous lines that push along the edges of the gallery as if a current or flow.
For more information, visit www.mfa.org or call 617.267.9300.