While the title of Santa Fe-based artist Joyce Melander-Dayton’s current outing at the June Kelly Gallery in New York City reads Extravagant Constructions—an apt title, especially when you are standing up close, studying the artist’s intricately bejeweled craftsmanship and her use of materials and patterning (think Faberge Egg or the Gobelin Tapestries )—it could just as easily have been labeled, depending on where you stand in relation to her work, where your brain is at the moment, and how well you know the artist’s past history, Musical Meditations, Celestial Compositions, or How I Keep My Life Together. For the exhibition is all of this and more—the ‘more’ being, quietly beautiful in the extreme, and very much alive. fine arts magazine 

Slow and steady, followed by a small, but nonetheless, near cataclysmic change in the direction of her work, seems to be Melander-Dayton’s modus operandi. At her three 2007 exhibitions at Aaron Payne Fine Arts in Santa Fe, Gallery Shoal Creek, in Austin and the June Kelly Gallery, the artist, primarily known for her figurative work, fully embraced the abstract, presenting her collaged, fabric and fiber-based ornamental elements on linen. At last year’s mid-career retrospective at the Rymer Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee, it was the artist’s free- standing abstract sculptures that made an unexpected appearance. This past summer, in yet another ‘new works’ exhibition at Aaron Payne, her home town gallery, it was Melander-Dayton’s three- dimensional wall hangings, composed of exotic wood veneers, wool, silk fabrics, and glass beads, that took us by surprise. 

Extravagant Constructions, yet another of the artist’s leaps into uncharted territory, is Melander-Dayton’s most elegantly curated , spiritually-resonant showing to date. It is hard to imagine – nonetheless, this is what transpires – that each of the eight works on view tackles so many ideas with such otherworldly elegance. The only possible explanation, other than acknowledging the visionary aspects of New Mexico’s landscape that bleed into your very bones, and the artist’s innate passion for music, is that Melander-Dayton has mastered the art of channeling, heart, soul, and a whole lot of psychic energy, into each work that she gives birth to. What better place to store your valuables. 

In Rondo (2010), composed of 40 modules varying in size and stretching nearly 9 feet across, Melander-Dayton recreates a mountain stream whose crystal -clear running water covers a bed of shimmering stones composed of intensely-colored glass beads and lengths of wool, woven into blue modules, arranged in a horizontal bubble-like flow, transforming Rondo into the musical equivalent of a babbling brook. The work, situated in a corner of the gallery where two walls meet—an out-of-the-ordinary placement deliberately designed by the artist to split our viewing experience in half—forces our eyes to jump from one wall to the other, effectively evoking the sense of swift, running water. 

A simpler work, in size and number of units, is Archipelago (2010). In eight triangular- shaped, sangria bubinga burl veneer gatorboard modules, decorated with swatches of silk fabric and strings of wool and beads, the artist revisits Okinawa, a chain of islands off the Japanese coast, where she lived for two years as a youth. In Ryukyu Rain (2010), one of exhibition’s smaller, statelier works—Ryukyu also part of an island chain in the Western Pacific—Melander-Dayton, decorates four green willow veneer modules, the very largest an oval, with her customary silk fabrics, beads, and strands of wool. The overriding color of this work is a dry-looking tan, and actually conjures up the feel of the island’s weather—the air that we feel is hot and humid. 

Music, (her daily piano playing in particular), in addition to informing her work—like surgeons known to have taken up knitting—keeps the artist’s fingers nimble for weaving, cutting, sewing, embroidering, and working a jigsaw to cut and shape various veneers incorporated into her work. Many of Melander-Dayton’s creations bear titles of musical movements and those movements, themselves—lively, spirited, repeat, and gliding—play a part in the artist’s selection and placement of materials, not only within each module, but in the ultimate layout of the finished work. In Glissando (2010), described in musical terms as ‘a rapid slide through a series of consecutive tones in a scale-like passage’, the artist emulates the slide, forcing our eyes to do the same, in an eight part, horizontally laid- out, walnut burl veneer, wool and glass- beaded work. In Con Brio, another musically- inspired work, Melander-Dayton places twelve circular modules in a vertical line. , The artist imbues each segment—playfully dancing up the wall—with the joyous spirit that ‘Con Brio’ implies. 

Allegro Non Troppo (2008), by virtue of its size, startling mixture of color, diversity of patterning, and sparkling glitter, and Theme and Variations (2010), which seems to be signaling yet another new direction for the artist, are the exhibition’s showstoppers. At $25,000 each, they also command the most money. Allegro Non Troppo, ‘fast but not too fast’ in music, has all the excitement, exuberance and fizz of a champagne toast at a New Year’s Eve party. Nearly two feet high, and ten feet in length, the celebratory work sports 42 variously shaped eye-popping, red, black and white circles in over a dozen different designs. Some are circles within circles that cling to each other. Others stand alone, each decorated in a different manner, with wool, beads, cotton and Japanese silk fabrics that look like small paintings. The overall effect, as eye-catching as the aurora borealis, is that of fireworks lighting up the sky. 

Theme and Variations (2010) is a whole different kettle of fish. (Detail, right, silk, cotton, wool and beads on Gatorboard. Photo: Jean Kallina)  While the other works on view are thin enough to underscore the modules’ flatness, each of the nine, vertically- hung, oval- shaped wall sculptures in Theme and Variations, with depths ranging from 2 to 10 inches, jump right off the wall, leading to a totally different viewing experience. The almost, but not quite, 2-dimensional components of Melander-Dayton’s other works which allow one to view many components as a whole, are ditched in this multi-faceted ensemble. Here, due to a variance of depth, as well as unique design of each sculpture—at certain angles they resemble cakes, at others, sewing kits or small hat boxes—the eye has no one flat surface on which to rest or come to a conclusion. As our eyes are forced to scan each work, up, down, and sideways, our brain, also, must observe, one by one, what it is that we are looking at. It is an exciting situation to be in, as well as a puzzle to be solved. 

By Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer 

Joyce Melander Dayton: Extravagant Constructions 

June Kelly Gallery 

166 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012 Tel (212) 226-1600 

Through March 29, 2011