The Memorial Art Gallery (MAG) of the University of Rochester is pleased to announce My Life Has Gotten So Busy that It Now Takes Up All of My Time, an exhibition of sculptural installations and photographs by Rochester-based artist Nancy Jurs that focuses on self-portraiture, autobiography, and personal narrative.
Jurs is well known as a potter who trained at Rochester Institute of Technology’s School for American Craftsmen. Less known are her sculptures and installations that employ found, unaltered objects, which evoke personages or anthropomorphic visions, and her manipulated photographs. These works of art represent a surprising and whimsical self-reflective conceptual thread throughout Jurs’ career.
“We are delighted to share these little-known works with our visitors and guests, which even Nancy Jurs’ most dedicated followers and collectors may not be familiar with,” said MAG’s Mary W. and Donald R. Clark Director Jonathan P. Binstock, who is the curator of the exhibition. “Nancy introduced herself to me as an artist who works with clay, and from the start, I admired her pots, dogs, abstracted torsos, sentinel-like and guardian figures. However, after a few years of getting to know her, I learned of a surprising and provocative conceptual aspect to her work, one that speaks to her understanding of her life’s work and role as an artist.”
The title of the exhibition derives from a work of art with a related name: Artist Statement (My life Has Gotten So Busy That It Now Takes Up All of My Time) of 2008. This piece is composed of long, narrow sheets of nylon mesh to which Jurs has affixed colored lint collected from her clothes dryer for over 45 years. The individual sheets hang vertically on a wall in a row like scrolls unfurled, and the lint is arranged in patterns of dots and dashes, Morse Code that spells out the words of the statement in the title. The artwork is simultaneously a reflection on the relationship of life and work, and an effort to make art out of work, out of the material of her everyday life.
“Spontaneity is the name of my game,” said Jurs. “I get an idea, and I want it now. That’s why clay is so wonderful, and that’s also why I like to work with found objects. As a dedicated dumpster diver for 50 years, finding meaning in treasure and trash is the only way I know how to save the world.”
Other objects in the exhibition include Lost Weekend, a suite of 15 photographic self-portraits that have been obscured and disfigured to successive degrees, all suspended by the weight of empty bottles of Tanqueray Gin. Gin is the artist’s favorite alcoholic beverage. Roofus II comprises reclaimed roof slates juxtaposed and hung on a wall. Jurs has more of these pieces of slate than she has ever been able to use. Installations of the work can be almost as large as can be imagined. At MAG the work will occupy a wall in an ideal proportion. Jurs arranges the slates, each with two holes, in a row to suggest a line of anthropomorphic visages, each with two eyes, perhaps horses or cattle peering over a fence in the landscape.
About Nancy Jurs
Nancy Jurs’ early work was primarily functional raku vessels. Over the years she has evolved and expanded her métier. In 1980 she began a series of functional wall shelves, or “wall pouches,” that suggest butterflies or female forms. Later came “blouses” that the artist thinks of as emblematic of women’s bodies and spirit. The relationship of the clothing-inspired pieces to Greek and Roman draped sculpture led Jurs to experiment with larger-than-life- size sculptural forms that suggest goddesses, women, and animals. These emotionally expressive clay shapes are hand-built or wheel-thrown and are glazed, painted with acrylics, or finished with any combination of techniques. MAG permanently displays a commanding pair of sculptures related to this body of work outside its main entrance, titled Emergence (1995).
Nancy Jurs has been a prolific artist for more than 50 years. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Art and Design, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Burchfield-Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY; Museum of Ceramic Art, Alfred University, NY; Antonio Prieto Memorial Collection, Mills College, Oakland, CA; Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY, and the Society for Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh. She has shown her work in museums and commercial art galleries nationally, including at the Delaware Contemporary Museum, Wilmington; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; International Art Acquisitions Gallery, Pittsford, NY; Snyderman-Works Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; Spencer Hill Gallery, Corning, NY; Towson University Art Gallery, Maryland; Fuller Museum of Art, Brockton, MA; San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, TX; the Bevier Gallery, Rochester Institute of Technology, NY; and the Contemporary Art Center, Kansas City, MO. Jurs was married to the recently deceased artist Wendell Castle. Together they lived in Scottsville, NY, a bedroom community of Rochester in western New York, since 1962.