Artists are storytellers who craft tales from matter instead of mere words. The conceit of this exhibition is to bring together wildly disparate stories through a common format, not of a book but as a small, level surfaced, floor-standing sculpture, suited to use as a table. Within this framework, a common struggle quickly becomes apparent, and a meta-narrative emerges. A consistent protagonist and antagonist reveal themselves in the roles of “the Physical” and “the Immaterial”, and their plotline follows the transmogrification of material, process, and technique into symbols, meaning, and history. The unfolding of this synthesis is our story.

Stories are either told around the fire or on the cave walls – they are spoken or recorded. A recoded story is experienced anew through the act of deciphering its symbols, whereas a talented storyteller allows you to experience a story secondhand by enacting it physically. Theatre and film attest powerfully to extra-verbal stories told with visual, physical, and auditory aspects. At the same time, while stories may be an elaborate odyssey, they may also be a meager haiku; fantastically florid and laboriously layered, or brutally economical. Indeed, a story may be manifested in so little as an object whose material and form reveal a process that tells of being made, tempting you to imagine how it came into existence by teasing you with clues. These ‘embodied’ stories are perhaps didactic, definitely deductive, and certainly wonderous for their ability to flower in our minds. With the myriad form that stories may take, telling them is, unquestionably, an art.

In this exhibition, nine artists of distinct style tell stories that are framed by the approach each one takes to the primary elements of the physical and the immaterial. They loosely divide into two camps based upon which of the two elements are either emphasized or originating. In the camp of the physical, the heroes of this exhibition are Elyse Graham with her beguiling resin marquetry and terrazzo processes, and Tessa Silva manipulating her historically derived chalk and milk compound. Both celebrate their unusual synthetic materials and unique technical processes to fantastical effects. In the camp of the immaterial we have Bertrand Charlot with his dense, character-driven imagery expediently executed with computer assisted output, and Kate Rohde, who expressively hand-sculpts glowing confections concocted of baroque symbolic imagery in a bricolage of synthetic materials. In the rich middle we have Rachel David and Trey Jones leveraging skilled techniques and idiosyncratic themes to work symbolically in the more traditional materials of metal and wood.

The dissonant aesthetics and disparate material of each work in the exhibition serves only to highlight their common struggle to wrestle with a material and shape it into a distinctively meaningful form. The simple moral of the exhibition is in fact a revelation that wordsmiths have known all along: story trumps style.

- Damon Crain