MATERIAL WITNESS
Virginia Mahoney + Sylvia Vander Sluis
June 2–27, 2021
SoWa First Friday Art Walk: Friday, June 4, 5–8PM
Virtual Artist Talk: Saturday, June 12, 4PM
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Material Witness features the work of Virginia Mahoney and Sylvia Vander Sluis. These sculptors process and evoke human experience with their material choices and improvised construction techniques. Forms reference the body through the senses, unexpected media, and inventive structures. Both artists approach their materials intuitively, discovering a personal vocabulary of form. Mahoney combines reclaimed materials and text in objects that resonate with sensory suggestion and reveal an exploratory manner. Vander Sluis unites contradictory materials in tenuous forms that reflect the human condition.
Virginia Mahoney
Muffle (detail)
Virginia Mahoney’s garment-related forms reflect upon sensation, reaction, and thought in her mixed media sculpture. Her objects play with language ambiguity, using text as a device to captivate, clarify or confound. Mahoney’s complex assembly of commonplace methods of making invokes both familiarity and wonder. Physical material qualities often inspire her unorthodox approach, which bypasses convention and embraces possibility. The resulting works, intricately rendered, tell stories both personal and communal.
Mahoney earned an MFA in Ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art (MI) and a BA in Art at the University of Florida. After college, she was awarded a two-year Core Fellowship at Penland School of Craft (NC). She has shown in juried and invitational exhibits both regionally and nationally, and has been published in Artscope Magazine and Hyperallergic, Boston Voyager and WBURArtery online magazines. Her work is in the collection of the Lancaster Art Museum (PA). Mahoney is a Core Member of Fountain Street Gallery, and works from her home studio in Brockton, MA.
Sylvia Vander Sluis
Partial Head (detail)
Sylvia Vander Sluis’s visceral forms hold opposing feelings without giving up either. Incongruous materials, both industrial and domestic, are combined in raw, emotional constructions. Inspired by the folds of rosin paper, the transparency of cheesecloth, and the grit of gravel, Vander Sluis creates metaphors for the dualities of life. In one sculpture, plaster gauze holds Styrofoam precariously on structures of willow branches. Her work honors both the fragility and strength of the human spirit.
Vander Sluis earned an MFA from Western Michigan University and BFA cum laude from Syracuse University. In 2020, she completed an Artist Residency at Vermont Studio Center. She has been published in Surface Design Journal, Current Threads online and WBURArtery online magazine. Her work has been shown in numerous juried exhibitions in the Northeast. Vander Sluis is a Core Member of Fountain Street Gallery, an Associate Member of Boston Sculptors Gallery, and works from her studio in Lancaster, MA.
