Tribute to a Modern Master, Alex Bay
“We are all spirits that vanish into thin air”.
The number of contemporary artists I truly admire is not large, so a while back it was with much sadness that I learned of the passing of the great maker, Alex Bay.
Above is a small piece I own. It’s a small table piece mobile and the top wire contraption moves beautifully as it balances and rocks back and forth.
There are many things I love about Bay’s work and I’ll briefly mention a few here. I am by no means an expert on his work, nor do I even have a full experience of it, but the piece I own and all his work I’ve viewed online, have me charmed and engaged.
I love Bay’s sense of craftsmanship. Things are put together in the simplest and most efficient way, but materials are delicately finessed and everything is strong, built to last, or at least way longer than we might last. There is an ease to the way he combines and constructs, a skill no doubt developed from a long life of practice. He cuts metal, welds metal, solders wires, bends metal, screws pieces together, combines a variety of wood types, many of them scraps. He has a love of old scruffy materials, as if to suggest a nostalgia and sadness over passing time. In the short video above, you can see the moving piece is almost like a heartbeat, the pulse of life, operating within a body that time affects. Many of the pieces seem almost to be artifacts from another time. He collages old bits of newspaper onto wood, and whitewashes this to give an effect akin to paint peeling off old walls. Painted surfaces are laid next to raw wood.
And I love the sense of intimacy that can come only from steady and close tinkering, and real mastery with your materials…..the sense that secret things can be hinted at, whispered about…without making too much of an overt fuss. The way paint is applied to a surface, and almost not noticed because it is so subtle next to a more prominent passage. Things seem hidden as much as they are revealed.
Bay’s studio was a large workshop on his beautiful rural Virginia property. Many of his pieces are large, also containing electronics both visual and auditory, as well as moving sculptural parts; the pieces are meant to be fully interactive.
I love Bay’s no-nonsense approach to making, and his workshop reflects this. It’s like a fabrication plant, where he arrives daily and is most at home, playfully combining materials in unexpected ways, ultimately producing things that hint at the heart-breaking beauty and fragility of life.
I like very much his sense of otherness. He doesn’t seem to fit. There’s an eccentricity to what Bay does. Sure, there are obvious connections to Calder (in fact his studio reminds me of Calder’s working space in its beautiful clutter), or Joseph Cornell, in his intimacy in tapping the poetic associations of old materials in their placement and juxtaposition. Bay seems somehow like an old hidden craftsman, quietly fashioning mysterious magical objects that are fascinating but leave us curious and wondering. And he seems quite separate from others in the art world. Alone and working easily with never ending ideas…..the best way to be an artist.
The interview above is excellent! The audio and video in the first few seconds is bad but it’s great after that. Turn the volume up.
As I have mentioned earlier, I have not experienced any of those large, more complex pieces, but on the basis of what I see, it’s fun imagining what they are like. Click on the Hayley gallery link below to see many examples of Bay’s work.
Click on the first image video too so you can see an example of how the mobile parts move. And also click on the sold work file…there are some wonderful table pieces in that folder.
Alex Bay Exhibition at Duke Hall Gallery, James Madison University
In the link above, Bay’s artist statement is brilliant, the best I’ve read, and explains so clearly much of his intention.
And from his audio interview, Bay’s Shakespeare paraphrase stays with me: “We are all spirits that vanish into thin air”.
I wish he could have stayed a while longer.
Visit me at my 2 sites:
Its always warming to find new artists, thank you for this post.
Thank you for writing about Bay. His shop looks fascinating, I could wander through it for hours as well as gaze at his pieces. His experience as a young person in postwar Europe is reminiscent of Anselm Keifer’s. Both seem to create work out of devastation and loss.