DAVID HICKS

The Harvest is a major body of work that signals the artist’s shift in focus from points of agriculture to the domestic landscape of ‘kept nature.’ David Hicks is based in the San Joaquin Valley in Central California, and this is his second solo exhibition with our gallery. Why is it that I’m drawn to the forms in the garden and the forms in the fields that surround my home? They are the visual dialect of my region. The Harvest is true to its name. Hicks creates hand-built earthenware sculptures in a myriad of evocative agrarian forms – thorny petaled artichokes and budding pomegranates, long-husked corn plants and slim bean pods, striated gourds and cut branches. His ceramics are glazed with dynamic applications, some mottled and layered, others bubbling and dripping. The palette is vibrant, at the brighter end of the spectrum; the scale mirrors nature, from large standing flowering plants to small blooms he calls ‘clippings.’ I look to the fields for references that hint at the temporary and cyclical nature of life. Hicks’ sculptural wall compositions are comprised of numerous glazed terracotta elements which Hicks selectively hangs in a geometric web of welded steel, then frames in charred oak, walnut, or maple hardwoods. On view will be Hicks’ Poly Panel Triptych (2020-2022), a monumental wall work of more than eight hundred ceramic elements suspended in an intricate steel frame. Woven into this sprawling nest of ceramic flora we notice new humanoid forms, ovoid clay heads he calls Strangers. Throughout the exhibition, these new figures are grouped in wall compositions; and others will stand one-by-one atop a long table. I look to people as mirrors that explain the questions about my physical and emotional self. I am watcher of people and observer of the natural world around me.