Gearbox Gallery is proud to present Refusion, an exhibition of new work by GearBox Gallery artist Harry Clewans and guest artist Courtney Brown, winner of the 2024 GearBox Gallery Juried Show Award. Clewans’ large scale composite wood block images on panels and Brown’s intricate, somewhat unsettling bronze sculptures both combine disparate elements. As the title implies, these two artists use an amalgamation of images, and materials, re-fusing them to create new compelling, and sometimes disturbing hybrid forms.

Harry Clewans has been making woodcuts of found objects for the last thirty years, building up an extensive library of images he cuts up and arranges to create larger and more complex compositions. Like mosaics or jigsaw puzzles, these larger works are typically comprised of hundreds of individual pieces that he Jts together to form a new image mounted to a wood substrate.

Just as everything in our physical environment is composed of the same matter, Harry’s large pieces are composed of the same collection of woodcut images. This approach communicates the idea that all things, by virtue of their makeup, are connected, and that all things participate in a cycle of composition and decomposition in which the old, the broken down, and the disposed of become material for the new.

Courtney Brown creates bronze sculpture using organic forms to ask questions about existence in a rapidly changing mechanistic world. Through surreal self-portraits, the artist examines consciousness, time and decay. Currently, the artist is making work using combinations of natural forms that are unsettling, often combining life with inanimate objects, to reNect our unsettled times.

Brown discovered a love for design and metalsmithing at Wayne State University in her hometown of Detroit. She spent most of her career creating jewelry, sculpture and custom furniture for other artists and designers in the Bay Area and beyond.