James Dinerstein - "Beckoning"

James Dinerstein

At a time when most things happen at the push of a button, and creation is defined by combinations of zeros and ones which conform with the digital frontier, my sculpture hopes to remind us of the importance of reconnecting to methods of forging materials into objects with our hands, processes now almost defunct. My work grows equally from my involvement with modern abstract sculpture and my feeling for ancient art. On one hand, it aims to restore to abstract sculpture the resources of plasticity and mass, and on another, to capture the spiritual weight and potency I experiences in archaic forms. My new series of sculptures, The Newtown Creek Series, can, I hope, reward an observer's prolonged and focused viewing. They aim to create a kind of palpable chamber music, a gesture of form and space, surface and incised drawing, revealed through a deep chiaroscuro. The individual pieces communicate with one another and reveal a visual language as richly abstract and directly expressive and accessible as music -- a kind of sculptural polyphony. I graduated from Harvard and studied with Anthony Caro at St. Martin's in London. I’ve exhibited at the Salander/O’Reilly Gallery in NY, and Grounds for Sculpture, near Princeton, NJ.