Jack Risley

Jack Risley’s large-scale sculptures transform the familiar into the uncanny. Animated by seemingly incongruous relational arrangements, wardrobe boxes, camping tents, drinking glasses, ripe oranges, whiteboards, soda bottles, and industrial dust mops all become sites of tender exchange. Are these objects and automata relics of an abandoned past or instruments of a future-in-progress? Each sculpture invites the viewer to reconsider the physical and spatial anomalies of our built environment.

Risley studied at The Cooper Union and earned his Bachelor of Arts from Oberlin College and his Master of Fine Arts from Yale School of Art. He has had a long association with Postmasters Gallery, and his work has been included in numerous exhibitions at prominent venues around the world, including the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, the American Academy in Rome, the Vienna Secession, and Yale University Art Galleries. He has held significant academic positions at the University of Texas at Austin, Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts, and New York University, and taught at many others, including The Cooper Union and Yale University. His many honors include a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Mid Atlantic Arts-National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award.