Brews & Shoes with True Respite
Sunday, June 12, 2022 | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Join us for Brews & Shoes at True Respite Brewing Company! Grab a drink and participate in a large-scale collaborative sneaker sculpture in conjunction with the artist's solo show – Footwork (see below) – on view at Glen Echo Park from June 10-July 3.
True Respite Brewing Co. | 7301 Calhoun Place, Suite 600 | Rockville, MD 20855
On view in the Stone Tower Gallery in June 2022 is artist Andy Yoder’s solo exhibition Footwork, featuring his most recent work. According to Yoder, “There are scores of solid, practical reasons not to be an artist, but luckily there are also some advantages. Being an artist teaches you to embrace randomness and uncertainty, rather than trying to avoid them. This comes in handy, because no matter how much we try to control and order our lives, the messy, chaotic outside world finds a way to intrude, which is what makes it so interesting.”
Thirty years ago five shipping containers fell off a freighter during a storm, dumping 80,000 pairs of Nike shoes into the Pacific. As they washed ashore on the coast of Oregon and Washington, a network of beachcombers collected and resold them. An oceanographer got word of this and collaborated with the beachcombers to create data, leading to an important study of the ocean’s currents. The news media picked up the story, and the oceanographer became a celebrity, making appearances on late night talk shows. Nike embraced his work and invited him to speak to employees about what became known as “The Great Shoe Spill of 1990”. Yoder learned about this while researching ideas for a solo installation at CulturalDC’s Mobile Art Gallery created out of a repurposed, solar-powered shipping container. When those containers fell into the ocean they made a big splash, and now the ripples have come to Glen Echo Park.
Most of the hundreds of sneakers Yoder has made are created from materials pulled out of recycling bins, like a beachcomber collecting Nikes on the beach. But in this group of work, he used cutoffs and scraps from the mesmerizing works on paper of Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, another artist at Stable in Washington DC. “Making art is a form of alchemy, and being creative gives us the power to steer the ship, rather than bobbing around like a sneaker lost at sea. With this in mind, if you come across a shoe on the beach (or a flip flop, or a bottle), do the right thing, and toss it in the trash. You never know where it might go from there,” says Yoder.
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