Holding Contemporary is pleased to announce Fool’s Gold featuring new ceramic objects and works on paper by Jodie Cavalier. For this show, Cavalier materializes the process of remembering and mourning her late grandfather, Gabriel Rico, by recreating objects belonging to him from memories and shared stories. Fool’s Gold opens on June 3 and runs through July 30. Gallery hours are Friday – Saturday, 12 – 5 pm PT. A closing reception will be held at the gallery on July 30, 2022 from noon – 3 pm PT.

In Fool’s Gold, Jodie Cavalier assembles a grouping of objects made while mining her own personal affective archive. Meditating on fleeting attachments that are embedded in the mundane, Cavalier sees objects such as good luck charms, horseshoes, and lotto tickets—all objects readily found in the artist’s grandfather’s backyard workspace—as agents of coping with loss. Fragile ceramic tools become emotional sites embedded with humility, longing, and poetic failures of mistranslation.

Made from mostly natural materials that hint at Cavalier’s family home and the vast landscape of the Mojave Desert, the accumulation of objects in Fool’s Goldembodies the act of dreaming and shared oral histories. Cavalier’s self-taught and resourceful material approach shows an immediacy and earnestness that can be both sincere and even humorous. The elemental works appear as both haphazardly forced and carefully considered, arriving at an intersection of abrupt loss, desperate remembering, and profound sadness.

Jodie Cavalier is an artist, educator, and artist administrator living in Portland, Oregon. She earned a BA from the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been exhibited with Converge 45’s Portland’s Monuments & Memorials Project in Portland, OR; the Schneider Museum in Ashland, OR; the deYoung Museum in San Francisco, CA; the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, CA; CoCA in Seattle, WA; Practice in New York, NY; and Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany; among others. She has participated in residencies such as ONCA in Brighton, England; the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover, UT; Wassaic in Wassaic, NY; and AZ West in Joshua Tree, CA.