Mike Bray & Anya Kivarkis | Time and the Other

Time and the Other examines the cinematic role of jewelry in classic mid 20th century cinema. Movies are a simulacrum of life, depicting the fraught dramas, romances, and glamour of our wildest dreams. In a similar fashion, jewelry elicits desire—it embodies our aspirations, what, and who we could be. Bray and Kivarkis mine two films: Last Year at Marienbad, 1962, and To Catch a Thief, 1955, for the sense of time, movement, and light that construct each scene and in turn, frame and manipulate each seductive jewel.

Bray and Kivarkis isolate, and meticulously re-create jewels from these two films. Directly translated from the single perspective through which the film is shot and viewed, these replicas—fabricated in white-bright fine silver—are truncated and fragmented, existing somewhere between object and image. When placed into new sculptural contexts, they become surrogates for the characters they once adorned, their new autonomy bold and brazen. In a few works, the jewels are re-filmed. Back into their original context, they are translated yet again, asking us to wonder what real really means.

Mike Bray received his MFA from the University of Oregon. Upcoming and recent exhibitions include Light Grammar/Grammar Light at Fourteen30 Contemporary (Portland, Oregon) and Marble, Mirrors, Pictures, and Darkness at INOVA (Institute of Visual Art) at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (Milwaukee, Wisonsin). Bray has been awarded a Hallie Ford Fellowship, Joan Shipley Award, and an Individual Artist Fellowship through the Oregon Arts Commission. His work has recently been reviewed in Art Forum and Daily Serving. Bray’s commitment to fellow artists is illustrated in his roles as co-founder and co-director of Ditch Projects artist run space in Springfield, Oregon and as a founding member of the Coast Time Artist Residency in Lincoln City, Oregon. He is represented by Fourteen30 Contemporary in Portland, Oregon.
Anya Kivarkis is currently Associate Professor of Jewelry and Metalsmithing at the University of Oregon in Eugene, where she has been teaching since 2004. She received a BFA in Jewelry & Metalsmithing from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana in 1999, and an MFA in Metal from the State University of New York in New Paltz in 2004. Recent exhibitions include Marble, Mirrors, Pictures and Darkness in collaboration with Mike Bray at the Institute of Visual Art in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, The Portland2016 Biennial, curated by Michelle Grabner, Go For Baroque at the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin, State of Oregon Craft at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Oregon, and ‘In Dialogue with the Baroque’ at Handwerkskammer fur Munchen and Oberbayern, Galerie Handwerk in Munich, Germany. Kivarkis was a recipient of the 2016 Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts, the University of Oregon, Faculty Excellence Award, and multiple Individual Artists Fellowships and Career Opportunity Grants supported by the Oregon Arts Commission and the Hallie Ford Foundation.