In Fool’s Gold, Jodie Cavalier assembles a grouping of objects made while mining her own personal affective archive. Meditating on fleeting attachments that are embedded in the mundane, Cavalier sees objects such as good luck charms, horseshoes, and lotto tickets—all objects readily found in the artist’s grandfather’s backyard workspace—as agents of coping with loss. Fragile ceramic tools become emotional sites embedded with humility, longing, and poetic failures of mistranslation.
Made from mostly natural materials that hint at Cavalier’s family home and the vast landscape of the Mojave Desert, the accumulation of objects in Fool’s Gold embodies the act of dreaming and shared oral histories. Cavalier’s self-taught and resourceful material approach shows an immediacy and earnestness that can be both sincere and even humorous. The elemental works appear as both haphazardly forced and carefully considered, arriving at an intersection of abrupt loss, desperate remembering, and profound sadness.
SOFA Interview with Kiara Wells https://psusocialpractice.org/category/journal/
