Jay W. Mead: Re-purposed
Jay W. Mead spent his early years as a painter, an enamellist and a political activist and puppeteer with Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater and San Francisco’s Wise Fool Puppet Intervention. His upcoming exhibition, Re-Purposed, at the AVA Gallery and Art Center, draws from these seemingly disconnected artistic threads, as well as from his own work in building and home repair.
Mead, age 58, constructs his abstract sculptural forms from discarded lumber and roofing materials that would otherwise be bound for the landfill and whose aesthetic qualities are waiting to be coaxed out. Wooden armatures made of scrap wood form the skeleton of each piece, which is then wrapped in sheets of metal roofing riveted to the frame. The aesthetic is stark and monochromatic; larger pieces simultaneously impose and invite. At 8’6” Attraction, for example, consists of two angular parabolas of weathered dove-gray metal nuzzling toward one another to form a rough arch, under which the viewer feels compelled to step and stand. A hulking, curved near-trapezoid sitting closer to the ground features a top surface with an oval picture-frame opening, angled for looking inside. A number of smaller pieces that echo Mead’s love of “twisted geometric” form are scattered throughout the gallery floor.
Mead’s work in the medium of sculpture, and his choice of materials, represents his environmental sensibilities in ways beyond just cheating the landfill through repurposing. Unlike the searing hot ovens required in enamel work, the energy expended in sculpture—human toil rather than fossil fuel—has (arguably) a smaller carbon footprint. The same is true of using materials close-at-hand. Mead says he doesn’t “forage” from distant sites so much as “gather” from his places of residence and work.
Mead’s work comments on time and history as well. With rare exception, he chooses to work with materials he has amassed in rehabbing older dwellings. The metal roofing, for example, estimated to be between 50 and 100 years old, wears the patina of age—patterned water marks and faint rust. Mead views reuse as preserving not only the materials themselves but also their known, and sometimes unknown, stories.
Image: Jay W. Mead, Attraction, King Farm, Woodstock, VT, 2017, repurposed wood and metal, each half of base is 27 x 27″, tapering to 7 x 7″, 121″ tall. Photo: Jay W. Mead.