Signature Moves: Perci Chester

by Camille LeFevre

To walk into Perci Chester's studio is to enter a landscape of towering metal forms, sprawling investigations of shape, whimsical dips into color, and succinct commentaries on mythologies ancient and contemporary. She describes her sculpture as anthropomorphic and as visual poetry that invites viewers to explore dynamism and stasis in tangible, surprising ways. For this exhibition, she's including two-dimensional prints intended to interact with her sculpture. More surprising are her forays into video. By projecting imagery onto a new sculpture, Wirewalk, Chester brings together all of her prior intentions and concerns with a vibrancy that juxtaposes past storytelling with future narratives.

City Pages 8/6/2014 

 
I so admire the deliciously manic playfulness in your sculptures. Depending on the piece, you are creating work where metal seems to float weightlessly off the ground, or to careen without impediment like a sprung coil, or even to press into the earth like a primal root. Always doing something — metal in action. I love the attention you give to the surface of the sculptures, whether it’s the glimmering surface of metal slicked in automobile paint, or it’s wrinkled sheets of textured metal that arouse eye and sense of touch in equal measure. Your work strikes me as conceived in response to a joyous amusement with the world. As a sculptor you find a strong ally in color—in fact, some of the sculptures seem to me like kinetic paintings that have burst three-dimensionally from a canvas.

David Harris, musician/writer Director of Rimon, Minneapolis, MN.

“Your work has such uniqueness of expression.”

Myrna Orsini, Director of Monarch Art Center
Tenino, Washington  

“The work of Perci Chester exposes that inner understanding…the integration of purpose and possibility, a directness and humor, light and profound.”  "I love the thought of Odalisque held captive by the shadow of her existence...you have a wild mind, really wonderful, brilliant Perci.”

Christine Taylor Patten — writer and artist, Taos, New Mexico

The amazing thing about human existence is that the world is intelligible. Even in times of absolute chaos, we maintain a unique relationship to our physical surroundings. The objects in it are more than lumps of matter. Given sufficient attention, they communicate to us. They disclose something understandable.

These sculptures exist at an abstract midpoint of this disclosure. They mean to interrupt the process of recognition before it is complete.

Alexander Lawrence Bender,
Tri-lox, Brooklyn, New York

"Part of the engaging aspect of Chester’s works stems from the interesting way they can be read as figurative art, even when our initial sense of the sculptures is abstract...Chester prefers to work in between genres of form, a decision that enhances the intellectual presence of her work as well as intensifying the long debate between abstraction and representation. Chester’s sense of artifice is often based upon form as it appears in the real world; however, she treats form as an open-ended inquiry, searching for the moment when we suddenly recognize that her composition is to be read conventionally, as a realistic treatment of how she sees."

Jonathan Goodman
reviews for ARTnews, Art in America and Sculpture.
New York

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, Minneapolis, MN