Vince Skelly, Sentinel

Amity, OR & Los Angeles, CA — Antica Terra and Marta are delighted to announce Sentinel, a site-specific installation of new sculptural works by Claremont-based artist and designer Vince Skelly. The second collaboration between the Southern California gallery and Maggie Harrison's legendary Willamette Valley winery following Lily Clark's celebrated Slip Condition (2025), this presentation of vertical forms poses a compliment to the verdant Summer landscape, where shape and gesture are encountered in the realm of their material origin. Concentrated within a section of Antica Terra's 88-acre oak woodland, an area where visitors are invited to wander as well as gather—the winery is home to the Table in the Trees, a 200-foot-long poured-in-place concrete table for meals and tastings that winds through the forest—we experience Skelly's works as both human and arboreal figurations. Initially borne of sketches for chess pieces, these works, scaled to feet rather than inches, compose themselves through the stacking of discrete shapes that build toward their full height with a false precarity, delicately balanced but unable to topple apart. Within this temporal sculpture garden, where Antica Terra has invited Marta to oversee the winery's annual summer sculpture programme, the land takes on the artist's constructions of spheres, rectangles, and triangles, as well as other, less familiar combinations of surfaces and angles, offering an elemental geometry that invites a deeper understanding of their materiality and, in turn, the teeming site of the exhibition itself. Unlikely in their placement yet seemingly innate to their environment, each work, carved from a single piece of Redwood—a species native to Oregon and California—maintains its idiosyncrasies: fissures, grain, growth rings, and chainsaw marks alike engage our perception of Wood and illuminate its biology without obfuscating Skelly's touch, toolings, and processes. This treatment translates to the artist's two bronze works, which preserve the character of their original carved forms, cast to carry over every detail from wood to metal—a material dialogue between mutability and permanence. Here, the Cast and the Mold offer distinct perspectives on shared forms that emerge from their respective additive and subtractive processes. Both are prepared for subtle transfigurations by the elements: bronze will patinate over time just as the tone and texture of Redwood will change and desaturate over the season's exposure to sun, wind, and moisture. Skelly's first purely sculptural body of work, the artist removes function while supporting interaction. By extracting shapes from his practice centered on benches, stools, and other functional surfaces, the artist contributes new forms to his own vocabulary, creating apertures where creatures of the woods may rest or nest; basins where they may drink or bathe. As we move through and towards these works we discover their nature in nature—a material returned, as it so rarely is, to its genesis.