December 7, 2024 – January 5, 2025
Jeff Downing: The Grand Façade: A Reverence for Water is an exhibit of boldly colored bas-relief sculptures in ceramics, found objects, and resin. These assemblages are reliquaries for water, inspired by the artist’s concern for drought and wildfire devastation in the American West. Using forms of historical and contemporary reliquary boxes, he created diptychs with imaginative symbols—hands, branches, fires, buildings, plants, and animals—surrounding antique apothecary bottles of precious water. The titles, such as Brachylagus Reliquary –Columbia River, WAlist his sources for the water samples, along with Latin names of flora or fauna that depend on local water for life.
He writes: On a road trip across the American Southwest, I became focused on water or, increasingly, on the lack thereof. The evidence was everywhere I turned, dried-up lake beds, dead fish, and acre upon acre of brittle, dying trees – the tinder of inevitable wildfires. This journey inspired me to produce a new series of diptychs in the form of bas-relief wall sculptures that address the effects of climate change, specifically the current droughts and wildfires occurring in the broader American West.
Jeff Downing is on the faculty at San Francisco State University where he is a Professor of Art and the Head of the Ceramics Area.