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The October issue of Art in America reviews the latest solo exhibition by Jim Toia, director of the Grossman Gallery and Community Based Teaching Program at the Williams Visual Arts Building.
Toia’s exhibition, entitled Dawn, was on display April 22-May 27 at the Kim Foster Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, New York City.
“Artists have used all kinds of bizarre materials [] but Jim Toia is certainly among the first to take the reproductive cycle of mushrooms and use it to creative advantage,” states the article. “In a fascinating exhibition, Toia presented seven mushroom-spore drawings and two videos inspired by his long-running interest in fungi.”
A dedicated mentor, Toia often includes Lafayette students in his projects. As an EXCEL scholar, Sara Talias ’07(Wyckoff, N.J.), an art major, assisted Toia with the production of the Dawn exhibition.
Last spring, Toia traveled to Taiwan, where he was an artist-in-residence at the Taipei Culture Foundation. There, Toia contributed a set of mushroom spore drawings, called Dissolving Garden,and nine television sets of uniform size, each displaying intentionally out-of-focus videotaped images of a variety of elements found in nature.
“The Dawn exhibition was a continued investigation of my fascination with nature – its deep-rooted structures, systems, and patterns,” explains Toia. “The work exposed some of the facets of nature we seldom have a chance to observe, such as spores’ broadcast from mushrooms in interesting and diverse patterns and lichen following a rigid growth pattern based on available light and the structure of the surface on which they grow.
“The new videos in the show, Dissolving Garden and Plume, play off a slightly different but related interest. They both speak less about nature’s process and more about our process of observation. My desire was to slow down our gaze and bring nature into a world that is often removed from our natural surrounding. Our world is a fabricated existence defined by rigid structures, right angles, and solid walls. Nature works differently. Edges merge and borders are less defined. Time relates to season and condition instead of a ticking clock. These videos attempt to draw the viewer outside of our typified experience and back into a moment of pure experience unmitigated by societal factors. At the same time, it also references the modernist tendencies of artists such as Mondrian and Malevich and the post-modernist proclivities of Duchamp and John Cage.”
An excerpt from the review follows:
Toia lifted his technique from mycologists who make and study spore drawings in order to differentiate species of mushrooms based on the patterns formed by their droppings, which mirror the distinguishing ridges underneath the caps from which they fall (it’s the same idea as making a rubbing of a leaf). The skeletal, white-on-black final product makes some of Toia’s drawings look like X-rays. Others more closely resemble photos of the Milky Way. The latter effect is caused when tiny air currents trapped between the two sheets of paper blow the falling spores around, creating a smear on the paper instead of a more precise imprint.
In Attempting to Right All Wrongs (all drawings 2004-05), tiny parasites, unintentionally collected along with the mushrooms, dropped with the spores and proceeded to crawl all over the paper, effectively “erasing” the organic material and covering the paper with a frantic looped pattern of negative space. Penetrating a Silent Life includes one golden-brown swath, indicating that some species drop off-colored spores. The diptych Grand Illusion is an example of what happens when the same set of mushrooms is used twice. Predictably, the spores in the masklike left panel are thickly caked, while the second run is wispier and more delicate.
One video that accompanies the drawings was made from photos and video footage taken over 10 years of mushroom scavenging. Plume (2006) was projected onto a piece of Plexiglas suspended from the gallery’s ceiling. In a three-by-three grid, close-up images slowly came into focus and fade into one another – an orange field becomes a veined leaf, a dappled river morphs into a rocky cliff. Dissolving Garden (2006), a collaboration with composer Frances White, is a mycological homage to Toia’s home state. The video is a composite of the Delaware Water Gap and the ocean at Sandy Hook, the two most widely separated bodies of water in New Jersey. Dissolving Garden was projected onto a wall dotted with clusters of lichen glued to the heads of straight pins, all collected in central New Jersey. Seeing the shriveled, mothlike mushrooms up close, it was nearly impossible to believe that they alone created the ghostly, languid drawings hanging nearby.
Toia has shown his work throughout the U.S. and abroad, including Taiwan, Germany, Italy, and Costa Rica. His work has been reviewed in publications such as the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Artweek, and Sculpture. He is the recipient of several grants from organizations including the Morris Area Council on the Arts Foundation, AP Kirby Foundation, Inc., New Jersey State Council for the Arts, and Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.
He currently is working on a project with another sculptor and a geologist in California and one with an entomologist and an engineer at University of Texas Pan American. Toia earned his B.A. from Bard College and M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts.