Jaydan Moore’s DUST
Consider the following hypothetical scenario: It’s the 1950s. An upper-middle-class woman shows her cleaning lady a heavy silver serving platter and instructs her to polish it in preparation for an upcoming holiday meal. Both women hold onto the object, their fingerprints lightly smudging the already shiny surface. Many decades later, in real life, an artist named Jaydan Moore purchases this platter from a secondhand shop, cuts it up, and makes a sculpture out of it. He solders it to pieces of other silver-plated platters he has collected. He wonders about its provenance, its history of use. The answers to the questions that arise live, in some way, in the soul of the platter. For instance, did the owner receive it as a wedding gift or purchase it herself? Did she genuinely love it or see it merely as a marker of her social status? Did the woman who polished the platter take pride in removing what must have been only the faintest traces of tarnish? Did she own a similar platter of her own, or care to?
Moore holds a master of fine arts degree from the University of Wisconsin - Madison and teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University. An exhibition of his work, DUST, opens at Form & Concept on Friday, June 29. “I like to think of these silver-plated platters as having three weird little histories, or little lies,” he said. “The platters were mass-produced, made to look like they were from the 1800s — made to look old even though most of the stuff I use is from the 1940s through the 1980s. Then, there is the silver-plated material, which is usually brass or copper. This is the platter trying to look more valuable than it really is. Thirdly, there is the wear, the care thing. Some people polish or clean it all the time, and that can be an image of the value it had to them.”
Moore, who grew up in California — part of a four-generation-deep tombstone-making family of Portuguese immigrants — has always been interested in material objects of commemoration, such as headstones and trophies, as well as what people leave behind when they die and the memories held within those possessions. He spent his childhood afternoons with his mother at work, watching grieving people come in to make arrangements about a loved one’s final resting place. “It was interesting to watch people take a whole life and distill it down to an image, the shape of the stone, their name, and maybe a quote. There was a moment when I got confused, in a good way, about people as objects,” he said.
When he first started this work a half-dozen years ago, he found a wealth of silver-plated platters available for purchase at secondhand stores and on eBay, which indicated to him just how common it is for people to have a connection to such tableware. “I wanted to create platters that represented all of those
“I’ve been thinking about the show title and reading about dust — about how it’s this slow accumulation of everything. You don’t notice it until it’s built up over time, and it’s something we are always trying to clean and change.” — artist Jaydan Moore
valuable histories, so I would cut up and put together as many as 20 platters in one piece, so you’re getting a big snapshot,” he said. “I thought my own personal narrative should not be a part of it. But from there, it’s kind of gone in different directions.”
Moore has generally used low-temperature heating in order to retain the original patina and not burn off the silver plating or melt pewter rims. But in more recent work, he is playing with higher temperatures as well as hammering and manipulating the metal in order to convey more of its material nature and let his own voice eke through at the seams. He mentioned that the quality of the original platters declined over time, which has an effect on his process and the finished result. “The stuff from the 1940s and ’50s is really solid; the plating is really thick. It won’t burn off from high-temperature solder. In the platters from 1970s and ’80s, it starts to flake off if you do too much heating. And you even start to get chrome-plated platters. They tried to fake the silver plating by using something even cheaper.”
Among the work in DUST is a platter made from bits salvaged from the creation of previous larger works, which Moore has saved along the way because he didn’t want any of it to go to waste, nor could he bring himself to throw away what he considers fragments of history. There is also a series he calls Specimens, which are silver-plated platters manufactured by the same company around the same time, but which have aged much differently based on use and care. He marries them together to show their differences, in a kind of vintage-inspired nature vs. nurture dialectic concerning inanimate objects. DUST also features intaglio prints of the platters and remnants made before he turned them into sculptures, a practice he began in order to preserve one era of an object’s history before he disassembles and repurposes it.
Moore’s personal narrative is now a stronger part of his thinking process about the platters, as are new thoughts he’s been having about social and economic class and the different relationships various people might have had with the same object in the same place. “It’s like memory. A small moment in time can be valuable to one person and totally unimportant to another. Memory is material. We alter our memories every time we remember them. That’s not a bad thing, as long as we’re humble and pay attention.” He is interested in the changing nature of his own work over time, in his attitude toward it and in what arises as he continues to sculpt with vintage platters — cutting remnants down into smaller pieces and finding ways to make something new out of each phase. He said that he sees in DUST the start of many new ideas he wants to explore.
“I’ve been thinking about the show title and reading about dust — about how it’s this slow accumulation of everything. You don’t notice it until it’s built up over time, and it’s something we are always trying to clean and change. But dust is valuable because it contains the environment that it is in. Dust is everything that has happened.”