Jerry Monteith
October 17 through November 14, 2008

This exhibition at Metropolitan Gallery presents work made over the last decade by artist Jerry Monteith that reflects a powerfully independent artistic voice and idiosyncratic practice. Monteith’s wood sculptures demonstrate a mastery of materials, a love of objects, a fascination with narrative, and a profound respect for nature. His materials are sensual, his process refined, and his subject matter is endearing and provocative. Monteith’s work is anecdotal and personal, but it is also conceptually rigorous in the manner in which his visual paradoxes combined with a command of color and space adds complexity and depth.

Based in Southern Illinois, Monteith is surrounded by the remains of a vast hardwood forest, which is not only relevant for the materials available to him, but has significantly driven a focus that distinguishes his work. Keenly aware of environmental threats and with an expressed concern over diminishing natural resources, Monteith approaches his art-making with a strong ethical stance and reverence for what he deems noble materials; trees. Recognizing that "a tree is more valuable standing than cut," he "uses wood that would otherwise be burned or left to rot in the effort to reassert its inherent value and re-establish the non-human-made environment as the ultimate paradigm."

Monteith is a storyteller and wood is his muse. He establishes a kinship among objects and encounters to create evidence of such things in his re-working of nature's extant beauty. The artist captures the essence of his material to abstract meaning from the surface. He then deftly enhances elements to comprise a series of graceful articulations. Jerry Monteith's sculptural sensibility is refined, his process sophisticated, his humor is that of a satirist, and most importantly, his work is unified in its expression of concern for each other and our environment. His unique repertoire begins inherently in nature and further materializes in his imagination and subsequent artistic production.

Jerry Monteith currently lives in Cobden, Illinois and is Associate Professor, Head of Sculpture at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He has had recent exhibitions at Dallas Contemporary, Dallas; Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, Mount Vernon, Illinois; i2i Gallery, San Antonio, Texas; the Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis; and Franz Bader Gallery, Washington, DC, among others. He has been included in group exhibitions at Mitchell Museum, Mount Vernon, Illinois; Yeiser Art Center, Paducah, Kentucky; Montpelier Cultural Arts Center, Laurel Maryland; Dolphin Gallery, Kansas City, Turchin Art Center, Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina; and Klein Art Works, Chicago, among others.

 

The Nu-Art Series is a Not-for-Profit Arts Organization.