Ariel's Life in the Sunshine, 2023 - 2024
Found tires, wood, screws, and spray paint mounted on plinth of found tires, pressure treated wood, 4" x 4" metal post holder, screws, and spray paint
Sculpture: 25 1/2 x 14 1/4 x 13 inches (64.8 x 36.2 x 33 cm)
Plinth: 40 3/4 x 14 1/4 x 12 inches (103.5 x 36.2 x 30.5 cm)
Plinth: 40 3/4 x 14 1/4 x 12 inches (103.5 x 36.2 x 30.5 cm)
Kim Dacres
For its debut at Art Basel Miami Beach, Charles Moffett will present new works by two New York-based artists Kim Dacres and Melissa Joseph. Known for their respective work in recycled tire rubber and felt, Dacres and Joseph both use non-traditional materials, as well as found objects, to create art imbued with particular powers of placemaking and storytelling. Over the last several months, the gallery and the two artists have worked hand-in-hand to create an exhibition that illustrates a profound, nuanced conversation between their distinctive practices both materially and conceptually.
Both artists share a unique background as educators. Dacres worked for nearly a decade as a teacher and administrator in New York City public schools and Joseph worked as an art educator for ten years in cities across the globe. While their works take on vastly different forms — with Dacres using rubber from recycled tires to create mostly large scale, monochromatic sculptures celebrating the influential forces in her life, and Joseph using needle felted industrial wool and found objects to render scenes drawn from her memory, familial history and autobiography — both approach their practices as evolutions of teaching. Beginning with personal stories and untold histories, they take accessible, often overlooked materials and translate them into captivating new forms, infused with humanistic lifeforce and assertive, worldly presence.
The presentation in Miami has catalyzed the artists’ shared exploration of the resonances in their personal backgrounds and practices. Conceiving of the entire installation together, Dacres and Joseph have created and situated their new works in active conversation, even making one new sculpture jointly. Dacres made celestial-inspired configurations of coiled tires to be installed upon the wall, in addition to the standing sculptural portraits and figurative busts for which she is best known. Within the bases of many of the portrait busts, Dacres has newly incorporated wool material used by Joseph. She further advances the formal possibilities of her rubber medium in the highly precise renderings of her subjects’ natural hairstyles — a motif the artist has used throughout her practice to investigate the multifaceted tensions inherent within Black women’s self-presentation in our contemporary social environment.
Joseph has long integrated found objects as the primary supports of her pieces — from mirrors to vanities to first aid kits — and during her recent Artpace San Antonio’s 2024 Spring Residency, she began gathering small, discarded tires from the Texas landscape. Echoing Dacres’s primary material, Joseph has used the found tires as supports in a new series of small- and medium-scale felted works mounted on the wall. Emblematic of the artist’s deep concern with materiality, the lasting legacy of images, and the generational reverberations of familial and individual memory, the compositions of Joseph’s works, both the round tire-framed pieces and two larger-scale felted paintings, capture fleeting moments in the artist’s life, her childhood most poignantly. Among Joseph’s works one particularly stands out as a reflection not of her past but her present — a portrait of fellow artist and collaborator Kim Dacres and her beloved dog Winkie.
In their material selections and largely self-taught formal techniques, both artists display the distinctive resourcefulness and endless determination demanded of women of color in order to live out their unwavering desire to create.
Both artists share a unique background as educators. Dacres worked for nearly a decade as a teacher and administrator in New York City public schools and Joseph worked as an art educator for ten years in cities across the globe. While their works take on vastly different forms — with Dacres using rubber from recycled tires to create mostly large scale, monochromatic sculptures celebrating the influential forces in her life, and Joseph using needle felted industrial wool and found objects to render scenes drawn from her memory, familial history and autobiography — both approach their practices as evolutions of teaching. Beginning with personal stories and untold histories, they take accessible, often overlooked materials and translate them into captivating new forms, infused with humanistic lifeforce and assertive, worldly presence.
The presentation in Miami has catalyzed the artists’ shared exploration of the resonances in their personal backgrounds and practices. Conceiving of the entire installation together, Dacres and Joseph have created and situated their new works in active conversation, even making one new sculpture jointly. Dacres made celestial-inspired configurations of coiled tires to be installed upon the wall, in addition to the standing sculptural portraits and figurative busts for which she is best known. Within the bases of many of the portrait busts, Dacres has newly incorporated wool material used by Joseph. She further advances the formal possibilities of her rubber medium in the highly precise renderings of her subjects’ natural hairstyles — a motif the artist has used throughout her practice to investigate the multifaceted tensions inherent within Black women’s self-presentation in our contemporary social environment.
Joseph has long integrated found objects as the primary supports of her pieces — from mirrors to vanities to first aid kits — and during her recent Artpace San Antonio’s 2024 Spring Residency, she began gathering small, discarded tires from the Texas landscape. Echoing Dacres’s primary material, Joseph has used the found tires as supports in a new series of small- and medium-scale felted works mounted on the wall. Emblematic of the artist’s deep concern with materiality, the lasting legacy of images, and the generational reverberations of familial and individual memory, the compositions of Joseph’s works, both the round tire-framed pieces and two larger-scale felted paintings, capture fleeting moments in the artist’s life, her childhood most poignantly. Among Joseph’s works one particularly stands out as a reflection not of her past but her present — a portrait of fellow artist and collaborator Kim Dacres and her beloved dog Winkie.
In their material selections and largely self-taught formal techniques, both artists display the distinctive resourcefulness and endless determination demanded of women of color in order to live out their unwavering desire to create.
