ARTIST RECEPTION | Saturday, May 3, 5-7pm
Municipal Bonds is pleased to present 100 Bowls, Boundless, the gallery's second solo exhibition with Afton Love, a Northern California native based in New Mexico. On view May 3–June 28, 2025, the exhibition centers on a sculptural installation of one hundred bronze bowls, accompanied by new works in bronze, graphite, marble, micaceous clay, and silk. Across materials, Love explores the perceptual and physical parameters of form through repetition and restraint, giving rise to expansion—formal and symbolic.
Love's bronze bowls anchor the exhibition both materially and conceptually. First shaped in red clay, one after another in quiet succession, they marked the start of what Love describes as a devotional and expansive process: "They were an exuberant profusion of something simple and humble. And I was just along for the ride."
Now cast in bronze and arranged in a radiating circle on the floor, the forms retain the lightness of their origins—hand-built, smoke-fired, and ceremoniously returned to the Mediterranean Sea. They emerged through repetition, a rhythm of making more about surrender than control. "As I emptied," Love explains, "they expanded." Multiplied, they became something more than themselves: vessels of mutability and measure, duration and structure.
To hold one of the one hundred bronze bowls is to encounter their paradox: weight and lightness, durability and sensitivity, held in balance. They hold light. They ring when tapped. They feel both fragile and indestructible, their presence unwavering.
Love's practice is rooted in material inquiry: each medium is coaxed to its limits, often pushed to the edge of its perceived identity. Watercolor techniques meet dry, mineral surfaces; forms appear weightless despite their mass—or, in Horizon, monumental despite its lightness. In the Raise paintings, lines ascend in accumulation, each mark responding to the one before it. The result is a surface that behaves like water—shifting, reflective, holding space while remaining impenetrable. Similarly, in Horizon, Love examines the line between what is seen and what is sensed. "A horizon," she describes, "is really an inner place that I dwell. An invitational edge."
Edges—between materials, perspectives, and states of being—run throughout the exhibition. In Hovering, soft matter meets structured restraint. In Everything to Be Believed (Box), a polished bronze vessel conceals its contents, asking what can be known by touch alone. Altogether, surfaces behave as thresholds: hovering, veiling, revealing. Love's work expands outward and inward—charting a course between the tangible and the ineffable, the grounded and the ethereal. In doing so, it affirms the presence of a language held in form, suspended in the space between.
