Alumna Devra Fox '16 Featured in Solo Show at Hesse Flatow Gallery
Alumna Devra Fox ’16 is featured in a solo exhibition at Hesse Flatow Gallery, on view from October 14 to November 13, 2021. This show highlights new graphite drawings by the San Francisco-based artist.
In these new works, Fox continues to foreground the transformations we undergo on a daily basis: in our physical form, our emotional consciousness, and the natural world. It is noted in the press release that by “depicting sinewy pieces of furniture varnished out of roots and branches, architectural elements taken over by nature, and imagined plants, Fox’s drawings embody the idea of growth in absence.” Throughout her poignant exhibition, the artist asks: how do we continue to grow and live with mortality, and how might the natural world continue to thrive without the living? As Fox grapples with these questions about the Anthropocene, she asks the viewer to engage with the future of our climate as well, thus creating a space to think within ecological time.
In these drawings, “Fox returns to a recurring motif of a stone—symbolizing the permanence of the soul in Jewish tradition—and concepts such as relational systems of support and containment.” Some drawings contain vines and vegetation surrounding the stone, showing the relationship between growth and the concept of the permanence of the soul. In others, “innate objects like tables and chairs take on a quality of life, conveying the inevitable connection between the object and owner, and in others, components simultaneously lean on, pull away from, and gently hold each other and themselves.” Each drawing highlights a different mode of relation, a different way to understand our own impermanence.
Devra Fox received her MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University in 2016 and BA in Studio Art from Bard College in 2012. She has participated in residencies at The Vermont Studio Center and the Kala Art Institute, among others. She has exhibited across the United States and internationally. Devra lives and works as an artist and educator in San Francisco, CA.