In Practice: Devin T. Mays

Devin T. Mays makes work through ongoing encounters with objects and material fragments. Mays’ practice—a particularly apt term for his methods of artmaking—sends him circling the blocks around an exhibition space, coming across naturally-occurring sculptural “moments” in the built environment, and returning to work and rework the materials and conditions at hand. At SculptureCenter, Mays tends to the courtyard and its gravel floor. He rakes stone, engineers piles, notices anomalies (holes, topography, old pipes), and redistributes volumes of stone to uncover them. Gather, Weight posits Mays as a patient agitator, a subtle intervener, a caretaker, and an attentive facilitator of art as something that comes in and out of focus at different times. In this way, Mays’ sculpture engages found object traditions with a subtly revelatory tone, drawing out a balance between artistic intervention and raw material. His work and the traces of his semi-performative process serve the idea that art is a way of being attuned to the world, a sensitivity to the unspectacular and idiosyncratic ways that viewers encounter and create relationships and meaning with dormant, commingling stuff. Gather, Weight reflects a process of reading or sensing the built environment as a potential manifestation of art in its own right, evoking a sense of finding sculpture without looking for it.