While older cultures never separated the arts from their daily rituals, we are now learning/teaching to integrate fine arts more fully into our lives.
The integration of art in the environment not only gives meaning to the place, but also often becomes symbolic, a kind of magnet. When in harmony, this integrated space feels right and is welcoming, characterizing the nature of this particular place in a heightened and more dramatic way.
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Finding a stack of work worn steel circles at a scrap yard, flat front and back giving them planes in their form, inspired me to make this new series of STEELIES. Steelies were the small steel balls, premier players when we played [glass] marbles as children. Pyramids are one of my favorite shapes next to parallelograms, liberating the rings to fly into space. Colorful use of car paint plays with the form opening new possibilities.
These are also models for enlargement as E-O, 15 feet high and STEELIE SPHERE, 9.5 feet high exemplify.
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The intention of these images is to create an enduring metaphor of the human experience with imagination and humor.
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Perci Chester is a versatile sculptor who creates provocative—and often humorous works drawing on forms from everyday objects to classical figurative elements. Cast in bronze, the parts are recombined and thus transformed, achieving something entirely new and unusual, while never really losing the shades of their origins. All of Chester's works seem to have lives of their own yet, like children, show traits of their parent's buoyant imagination.
— Jon Zorn, Vernissage, Flanders Contemporary Art
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These sculptures, resembling architectural forms created in stainless steel, consist of composite portraits of animistic forms denoting youth and aging, the generational and evolutionary scale in one ascending image. Animals share our planet, yet are invisible to many or exist solely in the imagination from literature tand historic anecdote.
These sculptures speak of their presence signifying our close relationship to them while projecting hope and suggesting stewardship in maintaining the continuity of all life forms.
My intention is to evoke a sense of interconnection, inviting the viewer to experience the work in an active way.
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Sometimes Chester’s work intersects abstraction and pure design, as happens in Transparent Luck…This work may be seen as one of Chester’s true abstractions, in which form is treated as its own end, without suggesting a readable construct. Transparent Luck shows that just as the artist can realize exquisite work that is purely figurative in nature, so can she work out idealized formal relationships that survive on their own terms. Both ShelfLife and Transparent Luck are successful works of art, leading us to an appreciation of different notions of form, which, despite their differences, communicate the artist’s skill in whatever she decides to do.
Unfortunately, contemporary art has become a battleground between traditionalists and the avant-garde, between purveyors of abstraction and artists whose work is figurative. One of the pleasures of Chester’s art is its unwillingness to take one side or another. She attacks the gap between idealism and realism as indicative of a false dichotomy, constructing work that reminds us that there is more than one way to see.
—Jonathan Goodman, New York based critic and writer.
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