Janese Hexon finds inspiration for her bronze sculptures in dance and in travel to Europe and Africa.

“I call it contemporary figurative sculpture,” she says. “It’s a story told as in a ballet, through the body.”

She’s an artist who does it all, from shaping an armature to adding the clay to making a mold to delivering it to a foundry to chasing the wax to bringing it back the studio where she works the patina.

Then she mounts the finished piece on a slab of marble.

She starts at 5 AM and finishes the day at 6 PM, working intensely to tease emotion out of bronze.

“There’s an internal dialog – I use techniques that I learned from dance, like the placement of hands or the turn of the head,” she says.  “It’s a technique of distortion, of something not quite in balance – that’s the African influence.  It’s not perfect, but it is dramatic.”

The idea is to create a piece of art that will change and present new perspectives to its owner over time.

“I really just want someone to take into their homes a beautiful piece that grows and shows them something different, because they’ve changed and they look at it differently,” she says. “It sort of reflects what they’re thinking – it just comes out, the emotion of it.”

She’s mounted her third New York solo exhibit at Pleiades Gallery of Contemporary Art in Chelsea, at 530 West 25 St, during this month and next. And she’s donating 40 percent of each sale to benefit the carriage horses that work ceaselessly every day in Central Park.

For more information on Janese Hexon, go to www.hexonstudios.com.

For more informationon Pleiades Gallery, go to http://www.pleiadesgallery.com

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