Wishes/Lies/Dreams

Wishes/Lies/Dreams Alison Stigora and Jay Walker

 

Wishes/Lies/Dreams Alison Stigora and Jay Walker

Walnut Street has the chicest shopping district in the city with delightfully attractive window displays, one of the perks of living in the city is walking past Joan Shepp and lusting after Y3 sneakers. But shops come and go and there are retail spaces along the hip shopping strip using contemporary artists to attract customers. At 1616 Walnut Street, artists Alison Stigora and Jay Walker created an art installation that’s all about recycling wood into totemic, dreamy contemplations on a theme.

Jay Walker  said to DoN, “For this body of work, I created while I was living on an estate. On the Maine Line, out in Malvern. And I was finding these big hunks of wood. So, I got a chainsaw and some chisels.”

“I’ve been drawing in imagined portraiture since I was a kid, I would sit down and draw some lines and find a portraits that just come out. So, having the wood to react to was an interesting process. I even created giant tree size ones with the chainsaw.”

What drew you to use the chainsaw as a medium?

“It cuts wood. Most of these are actually chiseled. I do make the basic shapes with chainsaws. But I do normally see things that I like in the wood and then do with it.”

Jay Walker ‘s installation of imagined portrait sculptures pairs beautifully with Alison Stigora’s wooden stick floating sculpture emanating from the window and swooping across the ceiling and out of sight. Moments of connection and conversation between the works, each creating enhancement to the other’s artistic energy.

“I work pretty fast. Most of my process is I move quickly and I try not to fuss with things too much.”

Are you paying homage to folk style chainsaw art? Like tree bears or totem poles?

“Most of it comes out of my sketch book. I’ll just draw shapes until l find a face coming out and I’ll react to that and develop that. The wood has already provided those shapes for me.”

 “Alison and I have known each other for about eight years. We both went to  Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, her studio was across the hall from mine. And so, we hit it off immediately, we have a lot of the same values and interests. But at the same time, she comes out of a more organic nature and mine is more out of like humanity and the figure.”

“So, we don’t overlap a lot but we complement. We feel the same, we’ve been together quite a bit over the years and we’ve curated each other’s shows before. She’s probably the artist I work with the most.” Jay Walker .

Alison Stigora is known for her charred wood installations, and there is a wonderfully light and airy take on the theme floating overhead in the high ceilinged space. But the sparkling allure of the crystal shaped construct is an inspired turn of direction from dead wood to cardboard. From a distance the large scale construct looks like wood, echoing Jay Walker ‘s chunks of tree trunks, in a strange way the artist draws out the woodiness of the cardboard by making the materials look crystalized. Like the moment of transformation in a fire explained in a visual metaphor of molecular dynamics.

“I was wanting to work with a material that was more immediate. And actually, it was really fun. To sort of play with a new media.” Alison Stigora

What inspired the new path?

“I think mostly because I wanted to explore new mediums and cardboard is so readily accessible. You know? It’s always, you see stacks and piles of it everywhere. And, you know, I like to recycle things in my work.”

“I just started building forms with it, I was really drawn to pyramids and I started building more and more irregular pyramids, it was like putting a puzzle piece together. It was really fun to work with, so, it kind of just kept growing.”

Alison Stigora has created large scale installations for the Crane Arts Center Icebox Gallery, Skybox and Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts. For those projects she gleaned the forests to find logs to scorch black then arrange in flowing meditative assemblages arranged like a flood of logs through large spaces. By concentrating on wood her attention would naturally be drawn to paper products in the urban environment. Philadelphia has fallen wood but not enough to build an Alison Stigora sculpture, at 1616 Walnut Street she shows how recycling materials can expose the spark of enlightenment she experienced when she wanted to make art. The crystalized idea culminates in a structure that transforms the trash we create into something as luxurious and lustrous as gold.

Written and photographed by DoN Brewer.

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Tagged as: Alison Stigora, art, art installation, Jay Walker, Philadelphia artists, sculpture, wood