Art & Life with Amy Gross

Today we’d like to introduce you to Amy Gross.

Amy, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
I was born and raised on Long Island, New York, in a town close enough to the ocean and near enough to Manhattan that spending time in either place was a simple day-trip decision, My parents were creative – my father was a painter and art director for a textile design company, my mother filled our house with books and music. This was an enormous gift – I didn’t realize until I was older how difficult it can be to convince your family that wanting to be an artist is a rational choice. In my family, it was accepted and encouraged, and my dad was the perfect example of how you can raise a family through imagination combined with very hard work. So I learned early that making things was something you could and should do every day.

I studied graphic design and painting at the Cooper Union and spent the summer after my graduation at a residency at The Skowhegan School in Maine. I came back from that kind of art heaven with the idea that I might be able to be both a painter and a graphic designer at the same time, giving all my energy to both. I started a surface design company and freelanced, designing plush toys and baby bedding, beach towels and slumber bags, bed sets covered with Looney Tunes and Disney characters and Muppets and Barney. At night and weekends, I struggled to paint, searching for a voice in the great chasm that was the art world in the early 90s. But, as it often happens, the commercial art overshadowed everything else. After over two decades of designing and a move to unpredictable Florida, I discovered how much I missed making things by hand, and finally believed that I had stories to tell.

Can you give our readers some background on your art?
I generally identify as a fiber sculptor – I make three-dimensional objects and installations out of fabric and beads and yarn and paper and wire. After years of designing with a computer, I had eased back into the world of things by making jewelry, inspired by the odd and insistent tropical plant life all around me. But I quickly grew frustrated by the constraints of wearability and began making shadow boxes, filling them with my own versions of the nature around me, little museum dioramas where nothing was real but seemed so just the same. And just like the living things that inspired me, my work started to grow outside their boxes and bell jars and frames and evolved into freestanding sculptures.

Essentially, they are my attempt to merge together the natural world and my own inner life. They suggest not only what can be seen, but also what cannot: the early alterations of time, the first suggestions of disintegration. I’ve always been attracted and frightened by things that are on the edge of spoiling, or overgrowing the small spaces they find themselves in. My elements cluster, tangle, cling and multiply. They adapt to the environment they are placed into, like much of Florida life, and become hybrids in their desire to survive and thrive. I’m endlessly fascinated by the way nature fills in every gap here in my adopted state, winding around every wire and sprouting through every sidewalk crack.

And yet, paradoxically, what I make is always the result of an exercise in human control – they are completely unnatural. I use no found objects, nothing that was ever alive. All are constructed with craft store yarns and beads and wire and paper and fabric transfers. So my organisms will not die. They’re still and silent proxies, fictions froze in the midst of their suggested transformation. I know that my making these objects will not slow or stop the clock, but I need to hold things still, to try to have a say in a volatile, uncontrollable world of change.

What responsibility, if any, do you think artists have to use their art to help alleviate problems faced by others? Has your art been affected by issues you’ve concerned about?
I think that historically artists have always had an important part to play in societal issues – whether through editorial cartoons, political caricature, satirical plays, paintings considered dangerous and deviant. Art does us a service even if it only helps us define what we believe in or don’t believe in, what we love or hate. But in the past alone, cartoon in a newspaper could spark an uprising, I worry now, with endless content available to us everywhere and all the time, that the amount of voices out there only blend together into noise. We tend to tune out noise, cover our ears, and end up searching instead for something that just emphasizes what we already believe.

My work is primarily influenced by climate change, and my fears about our rapidly changing environment affect my daily life. I live in a place that is haunted by hurricanes and might be underwater in a few short decades, so I find it painfully difficult to endure any policy that shrugs off science or denies reality. My art is obsessed with stopping time, with creating plants and life forms that will not die, that adapt and thrive despite the challenges they face. It’s my wish for the natural world and my kind of protest, but I don’t pretend for one minute that my making these things will affect government policies or change the minds of anyone in power. Voting and activism sometimes does that, and every so often movements take inspiration from visual art. But on its own, my kind of artwork changes nothing.

What’s the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
I show my work at Momentum Gallery in Asheville, North Carolina and at Watson MacRae Gallery in Sanibel, Florida. Right now, I have two installations in South Florida: “Silver Bees and Black and White Warblers” is part of Assemblage, in Culture Lab, at City Place in West Palm Beach, and “Spora Mutatus” is part of Reimagine, at The Satellite at City Place. Both pieces will be there through March 2019.

I’m part of two recent books that feature fiber sculpture:

Dimensional Cloth, Sculpture by Contemporary Fiber Artists, by Andra F. Stanton, and

Artistry in Fiber, Volume 2, Sculpture, by Anne Lee and E. Ashley Rooney,

Both books are published by Schiffer Publishing

Contact Info:

• Website: www.amygross.com
• Email: amydsign@comcast.net
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amyla174/
• Other: https://momentumgallery.com/ https://www.watsonmacraegallery.com/

Image Credit:
Amy Gross

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