AUTOVENT
Artist: Justin Cloud
Exhibition: January 22 to March 5, 2022
The eight sculptures comprising AUTOVENT combine manmade machinery and natural ephemera. Just like a rose is simultaneously seductive and repulsive, with her petals and her thorns, Justin Cloud’s sculptures stem from a similar tension. Therefore, while the soft walnut wood and lush feathers can be appealing, the antennas and the sharp edges of glass and metal send a signal of an object we should perhaps be wary of.
Intriguing and larger than life, the three cybernetic flowers growing from gear shifters in Limber (2021), Butter Lips (2021), and Tongue Tied (2021) beckon pollination with ornamental grass stamen and surveillance antennas. In Torpor (2021), Flâneur (2021), and Lo Bode (2021), steel branches are anchored to engine motor mounts and equipped with cold cathode thermometers. Feathered companions perch among their leaves while the structure gauges the temperature of the air. Built of steel, cement, suede, pewter, and pampas grass, a blue heron is perched atop a walnut pedestal housing its brood, as a tree viper, made of steel and motorcycle exhaust, hangs from the ceiling surveying the scene — evidence of its previous meal remains fresh on its lips.
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Biography
Born in a family of farmers, mechanics, and engineers, Justin Cloud finds inspiration from the environment in which he grew up in. Having worked as an automotive technician himself, his artworks often reference machinery and automation, and their relationship to nature. While sheltering at his home in Brooklyn amid the pandemic in 2020, Cloud shifted his artistic focus through cultivating a garden, growing vegetables and plants, and giving away food to his local community. His garden became a laboratory for introspection, criticality, and community activism. Currently, he is interested in the specific limbic spark that triggers human beings to identify with plants, animals, and machines. The artist wants people to be able to identify some part of who they are with the various characters in his work. In doing so, his work is less about narrative possibilities than one’s ability to empathize with the world around them.
Justin Cloud (b. 1987 Houston, TX, USA) is a visual artist living and working in New York (USA). He received his MFA from CUNY Hunter College in 2018. Cloud’s work has been shown nationally and internationally. Notable group exhibitions include ‘The Twenty-Ninth Bather’ presented at LTD LA (2020), ‘Battleship Po-temkin’ at Frederic Snitzer Gallery (2019), and ‘When You Were Bloom’ at Thierry Goldberg (2018). Cloud is also currently included in ‘The Drop’ at Below Grand in New York. His work has been featured in OFLUXO, Tzvetnik, Art-viewer, Brooklyn Rail, Art News, Daily Lazy and other publications. Justin Cloud is represented by Below Grand.
