Drawn from the far corners of the Big Apple, four artists share bounty from their compulsions to create.

Jay Gard

Jay Gard’s journey leading to a solo gallery show of cryptically crafted hardware began with an art school prank in his native Germany. “It was a very conservative, old East German art school,” the 23-year-old sculptor explains, “where there are many ugly bronze statues on the campus. I removed a statue of a sunbathing woman, and replaced it with a new one made out of copper.” The faculty, unimpressed by Gard’s rebel act, and angered that he damaged the original statue (“there was a little dent on an arm… I couldn’t pay for the repair… ”) booted him from campus. Gard took the opportunity to travel to America and quickly landed a job as multimedia artist Tom Sachs’s assistant. “He teaches me to work faster, to be less precise than we’re taught to be in Germany,” Gard says of Sachs, who has become a mentor, introducing Gard to owners of the Half Gallery (writer Bill Powers, designer Andy Spade, writer James Frey). Inspired by “watching and studying New Yorkers,” Gard taps into themes of ambition, power and control in his disarming, yet volatile renderings of real and imaginative industrial components. The above installation, “plywood,” is a New Yorker’s spoof on the cheap construction of so many edifices in L.A. (thus the appropriation of the legendary Hollywood sign). Explaining the meaning of “guitar parts,” one of his favorite pieces in the show, Gard decodes the goal of communication, 21st century-style: “It has a button for tone, a button for volume. When you hit the right volume and tone, you can get what you want.”