“My work embraces the duality of whimsy and fear – not as contrasting elements but as expressions of intimacy, as lovers,” says Saratoga Springs-based artist Tod Pardon. “I find an exquisite irony in using the medium of jewelry, meant to be an expression of beautiful adornment, as a canvas for fears real or imagined.”
To wonder how Tod Pardon came to wander the realm of whimsy and fear is to realize he was born to that world – that is, born to make art. Long before he received his MFA from Syracuse University, or his works were obtained for the permanent collections of the American Craft Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, his formative years were spent in upstate New York, in a home dominated by artists and pan-global art.
Although Pardon’s abiding inspiration has been a collection of small pre-Colombian Colima figures his parents acquired on a trip to Mexico, another important influence was his father, internationally renowned jeweler Earl Pardon (1926-1991). Both elder and younger Pardons were trained as painters. Earl eventually applied his aesthetic to a distinctive blend of enameling and metalsmithing that was fundamental to the establishment of the contemporary art-jewelry movement. After a four-year apprenticeship with his father, Tod went on to reinvent the wearable art format by introducing an idiosyncratic, sculpture-to-wear vision of his own.
Pardon’s most acclaimed creations are his quixotic brooches, earrings, and pendants, mounted for presentation on custom-made wooden pedestals. The artist’s imagery is eclectic and loosely representational, drawing freely upon his education and travels. Some figures evoke the colors of Miró or the Cubist structures of Picasso; others feature metalwork suggestive of the body paint of Africa’s Masai Mara warriors. Each piece bears a name as provocative, and often as exquisitely ironic, as the object itself. One exemplary piece, counted among the 31 new works in the Patina Gallery exhibit, is a two-inch-high female figure fabricated of sterling silver, and gold; inlaid with woods and pigmented glass; and accented with a tiny seed pearl. The girl appears to be laughing, howling, or crying; and is dressed in a white, flecked skirt. Pardon calls her “Snow Bawl.”
Tod’s work takes myriad forms – including music, video, and photography – and many of his shows feature a modular installation of changing digital photos. Photography serves as an auxiliary element of the Patina Gallery show, Pardon’s first one-person exhibit in Santa Fe. |
