The Valley is pleased to present Livewood, an exhibition of new works by Sam Boyd, Madeline Coven, and Tim Johnson. The artists in this exhibition consider the animacy of wood, looking beyond its utilitarian function as a material and acknowledging its aliveness. 

Tim Johnson’s sculptural wall works give new life to old objects. He works with furniture sourced from thrift stores and estate sales, as well as architectural salvage from his home city of Detroit. Quilt racks, shelves, and other vintage pieces, often Amish-made, are removed from their utilitarian function and tessellated into new arrangements. His sculptures recontextualize remnants of vernacular architecture, design, and craft practices into forms that vibrate with tactile familiarity. After cutting and splicing pieces of reclaimed wood into new shapes, Johnson applies crayon to the surface of the works, melting each one over a candle before applying it directly to the wood, building up layer upon layer to achieve a waxy matte finish. The nostalgic feeling of his palette reflects the duality of the Midwestern landscape: industrial greys and blues contrasted with earthy browns, reds, and greens, lush farmland set against the grit of postindustrial cities. It is from this regional context that humble wooden furniture is given a new vocation.

Sam Boyd’s visual language develops relationally with each new work by listening to the wood’s experiences and giving voice to what it wishes to say. Both being with the grief of losing a living tree when it is turned into lumber, and recognizing the potential within a milled slab to take on a new form, Boyd begins each work from a stance of reverence. His cabinet “Driving Through Potter Valley” began with a sense of swooping motion, a curved line that wanted to come forward from the slab of claro walnut that the piece is made from. Created during his time working at the Krenov School allowed for a period of slow, deliberate thinking. The curving side walls and doors of the cabinet were incrementally cut, the table saw blade slowly raised or lowered with each pass to trace the intended curve. The “staircase” was then planed with a coopering hand plane, itself made specifically for this purpose. The artist left the surface unsanded, a subtle faceted texture remaining as a fingerprint of the hand tools used to craft the cabinet. The interior shelves were then meticulously shaped by a spokeshave to match the interior curve of the sidewalls until they became perfectly flush. The brass hinges and pulls, as well as the friction latch which utilizes a hidden spring to gently hold the door closed, are all custom-made by hand to delicately realize the function of the piece. Each decision, however small, was given time to unfold through conversation with the material.

Madeline Coven’s works begin with an aluminum form called an ‘endocast,’ derived from the internal cast of a hollow object. She works with fossils, primarily paleobotanical remnants of seeds, cyanobacteria, algae, plankton, and shells. An impression of the fossil’s inverse cast in aluminum is then transferred to a walnut slab by burning and carving, and finally displayed side by side on the resulting sculptural work. This casting and burning process makes repeated, and gradually more abstracted, translations of inner space into outer space. A new record of the aluminum form is created, while simultaneously obscuring the original object from which the cast was derived. Coven’s endocast series has previously included other substrates onto which the aluminum form was impressed, such as ceramic, which recorded the impressions in a more detailed way. In this case, the use of burnt wood recalls the imperfect duality of fire in a forest ecosystem, both destructive and cleansing, initiating a process of renewal.

Wood keeps its own record of time, light, soil conditions, climate events, and even injuries. The artists in this exhibition collaborate with their material to respond to embedded histories and add new rings of information. 𓇢𓆱