STICKS & STONES
Chris Lux, Oreka James, Jade Townsend, Skye Volmar
Bowling Green State University
Sept 2023 - Dec 2023
Sticks and Stones brings together the vibrant, amorphic practices of Chris Lux (US), Oreka James (Canada), Jade Townsend (New Zealand), and Skye Volmar (US) to consider the porous relationship between contemporary visual art and poetry. Across painting, sculpture, drawing, glass, and multimedia installation, the exhibition approaches poetry not simply as text or reference, but as a way of structuring sensation, rhythm, image, and meaning. In these artists’ hands, form behaves like language: it fragments, gathers, stutters, spills, and crystallizes. The exhibition asks how artworks can operate poetically, not only through metaphor or narrative, but through gesture, atmosphere, compression, and the evocative residue they leave behind.
Rather than illustrating poems, the works in Sticks and Stones inhabit poetic conditions of openness, indeterminacy, and transformation. Each artist engages materials as a kind of living syntax, where surfaces, textures, colors, and spatial relations become vehicles for suggestion rather than fixed declaration. What emerges is an exhibition attentive to the unstable space between feeling and form, where meaning remains mobile, sensorial, and unfinished. By foregrounding practices that are intuitive, mutable, and materially expressive, the exhibition locates poetry within the very process of making.
With the artists onsite for two weeks to produce new site-specific installations, Sticks and Stones also emphasizes poetry as an event of relation: to place, to material, to the body, and to others. The exhibition unfolds as something provisional and responsive, shaped in direct dialogue with the space rather than imposed upon it. In this way, it proposes exhibition-making itself as a poetic act, one grounded in accumulation, improvisation, and encounter. Sticks and Stones ultimately offers a meditation on how contemporary art can hold language at its edges, giving form to what resists easy statement but insists on being felt.
Oreka James (b. 1991, Toronto, Ontario, Canada) creates paintings and sculptures of portals to alternative realms, in which moments of love, spirituality, the metaphysical and the ephemeral collide. Informed by oralities and folklore, she recalls peoples, places, and stories deeply rooted in their personal life and culture, considering the excavation of histories and futures as a means of wayfinding. Sometimes rendering objects and symbols that hold esoteric knowledge as placeholders for the unknown, James is committed to finding connections between fabricated and literal scapes. James received their BFA in Drawing and Painting at the Ontario College of Art and Design University while studying Furniture Design. She has completed a group residency at the Art Gallery of Ontario and has shown at spaces such as Projet Pangee, Montreal; Efrain Lopez Lopez Project Space, Chicago; Patel Brown Gallery, Toronto; Mercer Union, Toronto; Gallery 44, Toronto; and Margin of Eras Gallery, Toronto; James currently lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Chris Lux
Born 1980, San Francisco, USA. Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA.
Jade Townsend (Ngāti Kahungunu) is a visual artist and storyteller working at the intersection of her Māori, Pākehā and British heritage. She was born and raised in Whanganui before moving to Liverpool, United Kingdom where she lived as a teenager. Townsend recently exhibited a site-specific sculptural commission Matariki at Commercial Bay as part of Whānau Mārama a Māori group exhibition throughout the shopping precinct to celebrate the Māori New Year. Townsend has recently had a solo exhibition Panic Buy at RM Gallery, a collaborative exhibition called Ā muri atu / In the future with Emiko Sheehan at RAMP gallery in Kirikiriroa. Townsend recently brought together a group of artists in the project Hauhake and led a wānanga at Objectspace as part of the Caravannex On Tour artist in residence series. She has previously been awarded residencies at Artspace Aotearoa, Slade School of Art, London and Red Gate Gallery, Beijing. Townsend has exhibited globally across museum, gallery and concept store spaces. Jade holds a BA Hons Fine Art Painting from Manchester Metropolitan University.
Skye Volmar is New Jersey born and bred with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She currently lives and works in Philedalphia. Volmar is a recipient of the Florence Leif Award, grants from the Kyoto Fund and the Center for Reconciliation, a fellowship at the OxBow School of Art and Artist Residency, and an offer for residency with Vermont Studio Center. Recent exhibitions include flower, child (Deli Gallery), among others. Recent publications include Artsy, Harper’s Bazaar Arabia, and Paper Magazine
