Knock Off by Mallory Weston & Adam Grinovich

Artist list

Adam Grinovich, Mallory Weston

Using jewelry itself, from the banal to the extravagant as a starting point, each artist utilizes his or her unique form language to express and reflect through pendants, necklaces, rings, and brooches. New media, digital culture, emerging technologies, contemporary symbols, kitsch, and appropriation. Knock Off presents two artists within whose work the contemporary manipulates the traditional. Both artists viewing historical elements of adornment from a 21st century perspective. Two distinct bodies of work meeting through the process of wearable objects.

In the exhibition Mallory Weston shows work that can be viewed in two ways, carved stone pendants made from fluorescent minerals, types of rocks that appear very normal under natural light, but under UV light they glow in spectacular, bright, neon colors. The shapes of the rocks look identical to the glass tubing of neon signs, a uniform thickness, and emulating the twists and turns of the singular glass tube that's bent to form the design. Adam Grinovichs’ work attempt to express jewelry through its most basic and iconic forms. The faceted stone, an object of desire, is the central element that ties together all of the pieces in the series. These stones are arranged into complex pieces as necklaces, brooches and rings, using techniques both traditional and state of the art.

Mallory Weston is an artist currently living and working in Philadelphia, USA. She received her MFA in Jewelry + Metalsmithing from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, USA 2013. Mallory currently works as a professor of Jewelry and Metals at several Philadelphia area colleges and universities.  In addition to her career as an educator, she maintains an active studio practice as a member of the JV Collective, a group of five female art jewelers. In the spring of 2016 she was selected as an artist in residence with the Artist Studios program at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.

Adam Grinovich was born in Lynn Massachusetts, USA. He received a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. After that he moved to Stockholm, Sweden to study at Konstfack University from where he received a MFA 2008. Adam Grinovich work as a jewellery artist and he is one of the founding members of the group A5, an artistic collaborative focused on adornment, the body, and jewelry in cultural contexts, as well as, one of the co-founders of the design collective CRITIAL + which is an energetic design initiative with a focus on design ethics. 2014 he went to Lappeenranta in Finland for LARES Laser Art Residency.