Metal-morphosis

Jeremy Mayer, Melanie Piech, Joseph Martin, Nemo Gould

We are pleased to announce Metal-morphosis, a group exhibition featuring Jeremy Mayer, JoeJoe Martin, Melanie Piech, and Nemo Gould, inspired by the industrial echoes of metal. The opening reception for Metal-morphosis is Saturday, February 8th, 2025 from 6-9pm. It is free and open to the public. The exhibition will be on view to the public until March 15th, by appointment only.

The works in Metal-morphosis redefine found metal and other forgotten possessions from junkyard scrap into fantastical sculptures and digital curiosities. The artists push their preferred found components beyond original use and are able to induce surrealist humor and introspection, explore biomorphic forms, imitate bird calls and go against the grain of this male-dominated practice.

Jeremy Mayer’s practice is heavily inspired by the etchings of biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel, particularly his work depicting diatoms, starfish, sea urchins, and other circular or spherical lifeforms. He juxtaposes that interest with the aesthetics of componentry from the world's largest machine, the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland. Combining the two, he hones in on mandala-like reliefs, revealing a common visual language between small creatures and large machines.

Nemo Gould’s sculptures are based on two distinct approaches to found-object kinetic art. They seek escapism through surreal characters while driving a narrative of coming to terms with the increasing violence and absurdity of contemporary life.

JoeJoe Martin plays with sounds and found footage in his various series. One piece titled “Two Mockingbirds” employs the sounds of two mockingbirds speaking to one another, yet these “birds” are reclaimed cathode ray tubes, displaying analog visualization of their birdsong as it plays through embedded speakers. The artwork is light sensitive, and the birds will go to sleep if covered by a blanket. Nestled amongst the “bird”-focused work, JoeJoe will present a new series titled “Borrowed Memories” showcasing found or purchased home movies. This new production explores the transactionality of our personal and precious memories. Peering into the lens of secondhand video and film cameras, the viewer may watch snippets from another person’s life and be led to wonder how a collection of VHS-C tapes or hundreds of Super 8MM reels end up on eBay, in Urban Ore, or may be simply discarded on the street. Each of the three cameras displays hours of video from different families.

Melanie Piech revels in working with metal and crafting art from refuse that continues the history of handmade work. She subverts materials that are almost always handled by men and transforms them into compositions resembling stereotypical “women’s work” like weaving and sewing. This process not only challenges the gender norm of metal work but also the innate properties of metal itself by liking it to soft materials.

ARTIST BIOS

A native of Northern Minnesota, Jeremy Mayer lives and works in Sonoma County, California.

JoeJoe Martin is an artist and Computer Engineer living in Brisbane, CA. After working as a software engineer in the wireless industry for a decade he moved on to a more fulfilling career using his technical skills and passion for aesthetics to bring life to art installations and experiences across the world. He has provided custom circuitry and systems design to some of the most loved and influential artworks of Burning Man and has thrown photons at many iconic buildings as a Technical Director at Obscura Digital. His own artworks often explore and juxtapose the digital and organic, and have been shown in galleries in Atlanta, Austin, Cape Town, Oakland, and San Francisco, as well as the Jacksonville MoMA in Florida.

Melanie Piech was born in Los Angeles, California, and practiced law for 14 years, most of that time as a plaintiff’s class action lawyer learning firsthand how greed and power, both public and private, disrupt fairness and justice. After stepping away to have a child, she returned to school to study sculpture. She spent 10 years part-time at SFAI, graduating in 2018, and now works out of a SOMA warehouse. She has always been a maker.

Self-described "Chairman of the Hoard" Nemo Gould is a master accumulator, of both materials and building techniques alike. His Oakland studio is a veritable museum of old objects and technology which he blends into his signature style of kinetic sculpture. His work pushes the limits of found object art and challenges the viewer to experience art through interaction and experience. Gould received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1998, and his MFA in sculpture from U.C. Berkeley in 2000. His work is featured in museums and collections throughout the U.S. and abroad.

ARTIST STATEMENTS

Jeremy Mayer
I've been making sculptures from typewriter parts for 30 years using a process that I informally call cold assembly. I don't weld, solder, or glue the sculptures together: I simply disassemble typewriters then reassemble the components into abstract and figurative biological forms.
The work is a meditation on such subjects as: transition of technology, creative reuse, right-to-repair laws, planned obsolescence, the backlash against modern tech, the persistence of the QWERTY keyboard, the nature of the human supply chain, and the attribution of human qualities to machines.

JoeJoe Martin
For most of my life I've been fascinated by circuitry and electronics, which has led to a vast collection of obsolete gear to dismantle and explore. With my art, I often rework and reimagine parts from these archaic objects, viewing them through the lens of anthropomorphism and anachronism. By infusing sterile electronic components with human-like qualities, I aim to make works that are both accessible and whimsical, offering a fresh perspective on the technology as I reimagine its purpose.

Melanie Piech
Metal is my primary medium. I am drawn to its foundational role in industry and infrastructure and have chosen to work with it in part for how it encodes my art with this history. This history of making and building with metal is, however, largely dominated by men, and it is important to me to challenge these kinds of stereotypes. From concept through construction, the process of making each piece is as significant to me as the end result. Making things oneself keeps alive a type of language regarding how things are built and how things work that I fear we are in danger of losing. Making things oneself also represents a form of rebellion, a rejection of our modern produced-in-excess, produced-elsewhere, produced-to-be-used-and-discarded ways. The re-use of metal affects the creative process, constraining it by the physical properties of the found objects, but also expanding it as the art automatically includes the unknowable prior existence of the re-used objects.

Nemo Gould
The first step in found object art is the act of forgetting, letting go of your presumptions. It is the tension between an object’s intended purpose and the potential of its physical and conceptual properties that is at the core of my work. The gathering and sorting of parts becomes as much a creative act as their eventual assembly. As my parts collection grows, so too does the web of possible connections between each object or image. My task is to find the signal in the noise of a runaway consumer culture and glean its essential truths, and communicate through my own lens through satire, conflict and humor.