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Jim Toia, director of the art department’s Community-Based Teaching program, is opening his latest exhibit titled At the Mercy of the Gate at the Kim Foster Gallery in New York City. The exhibit will run May 3-31.
An artist reception for Toia will take place at the gallery, located at 529 West 20th Street, on Saturday, May 3 from 6 – 8 p.m. Gallery hours are Tuesday – Saturday from 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Toia’s exhibit evokes the raw, unpredictable quality in nature’s underlying processes and structures. The work includes pewter casts of large ant colonies that Toia had taken from the dry soil of the Rio Grand Valley in southern Texas, as well as colonies from New Jersey. The exhibit also includes drawings made from stained spider’s webs, white mushroom spores dropping onto black toothy paper and linen, and jelly fish plucked from the Atlantic Ocean off the New Jersey coast.
Toia recalls a disturbing incident that happened to him toward the end of this time in southern Texas that illustrates the theme behind his exhibit and also inspired the title. He found himself in rural Mexico trapped behind a locked gate and being threatened by a drunken local.
“I was struck by my response,” Toia recalls. “Instead of fear, a rage unlike any I had ever had overcame me. This man was threatening my life and my response was a stark willingness to kill rather than be killed.”
Although the incident ended peacefully, Toia explains this raw, emotional reaction was natural to the basic instinct of survival, yet it is a reaction that humans do not encounter very often. With his exhibit, he seeks to spotlight such processes that happen in nature every day, as well as humanity’s vulnerability and lack of acknowledgement of these processes.
“As humans, we’ve developed structures and multiple kinds of security blankets that keep us sheltered from nature and many of its processes that we constantly think of ourselves as separate from nature,” Toia says. “That is until we encounter a natural force that’s much stronger than us and breaks our structures and walls, such as a hurricane or tsunami. There are brutal things happening all around us in nature every day, such as an ant eater eating ants or a spider catching prey in its web. These are incidents that we often overlook, but mean life or death to other animals. We are much closer to nature’s whim than we think, which is humbling to acknowledge. I choose to make art that reflects that fragility.”
Assisting Toia with the art-making process were Anna Raupp, an artist from Brooklyn who has assisted Toia with multiple projects; David Nicholas, a senior at Easton High School who is a part of the community arts program; and American studies major Nicole Sidrane ’08 (Wardsboro, Vt.).