January 28 – May 6, 2018
2814 Wilshire Boulevard, between Stanley and Curson Avenues
Los Angeles, cafam.org

That old dog, clay, seems to be pulling off an impressive array of surprising new tricks. While ceramics remains among the most venerable – and stubbornly tactile – of mediums, that doesn’t mean that it has been resistant to the conceptual upheavals within the ceramics world of recent decades. If anything, this ambitious survey exhibition suggests, the current moment seems to be a highly fruitful one for practitioners pushing the medium in all sorts of new directions, through promiscuous hybrid forms involving installation, mixed media, technology, and even time-based performance.

Intended as the first iteration of a ceramic biennial, ”Melting Point” is at its best in examining the overlap between the medium’s allegorical impulses and its roots in functional form. Featuring 22 artists from around the country, ranging from established figures to recent graduates, the show sprawls insouciantly across the museum’s three levels, flaunting a panoply of stances, scales and sensibilities, from the ragged to the glazed, the distilled to the distressed, to whatever unlikely unions of the above.

The interrogative tone for the show was set at the opening, with a performance work by 28-year-old Armando Cortes, who laboriously dragged his own weight in raw clay several long blocks from the sidewalk in front of LACMA, finally hauling it up the museum’s stairs as it scuffed the floor: literally lugging the burden of the medium’s complex legacy. Titled El Peso de La Tierra (2017-18), the work melds references to Chris Burden’s infamous ordeal-performances of the 1970s and the medium’s proletarian roots, through the muscular immediacy of manual labor. The show’s curators identified a trio of themes that link the works: “Anti-Disciplinary Approaches,” “Ephemerality,” and “New Sociopolitical Interpretations.” But these groups were considered loosely and many works, like Cortes’s performance, embraced more than one category.

Stanton Hunter’s works overtly invite audience participation. In his series Untitled Unvesseled II (2018), he asks viewers to drip water onto vessels of unfired clay, allowing them to crumple over time. Wayne Perry courts viewer reaction through placement; setting out sagging clumps and clusters of small pots along the museum’s staircase, and other peripheral spaces, interspersing white and black vessels among groups of terra cotta, he employs his notably imperfect vessels as a loose form of social allegory. The dramatic works of Cheryl Ann Thomas also revel in their formal imperfection; made by firing large, thin columns of clay to the point of collapse, and evoking giant swathes of gauze, they derive poignant form and purpose from their surrender to gravity.

Emphatically allowing his process to mold his forms, Walter McConnell, a professor at Alfred University and one of the show’s elder statesmen, presented a quixotic meditation on nature and culture. Set off by the plastic curtain enclosing it, his pillar of flowery forms, called A Florid Heap (2018), remains perpetually moist and unfinished, in a self-contained terrarium of sorts. To anyone still expecting ceramics to be prim and neatly allusive, McConnell offers a sharp theatrical rebuke. The show does include its share of LA-based ceramic hotshots. Among them: Matt Wedel, with his monumental rocklike desert blooms; Julia Haft-Candell, whose twisty infinity forms interweave references to sketches, knots and bows; and Kristen Morgin, whose remarkable trompe l’oeil tableaux of paint cans and ragged toys and tattered old paperbacks and record albums conjure the detritus of family attics or basements, the flotsam and jetsam of childhood memory.

Patsy Cox, who also curated this year’s Scripps Ceramic Annual, merges technological and formal innovation. Her concoctions of tiny top-like shapes, multiplied via 3-D printing, suggest at once loopy baskets of plastic toy flowers, blow-ups of cellular organisms, and fractal abstractions. In terms of sheer diversity of surface and technique, the show offers a startling range, from the giddily baroque fixtures of Anthony Sonnenberg to the vividly colorful, oozily distressed cups of Brian Rochefort. Despite their roots in traditional functional forms, the subversive intent of these works is intoxicating–though you surely wouldn’t want to drink from them.

The more banal implications of ceramic as a vehicle for mass-market serving ware or tchotchkes are addressed adroitly through the works of Jonathan Mess, who offered cross-sections of found ceramics, like geological samples; and Emily Sudd, whose bisected vases were stuffed with diverse ceramic gleanings and then fired to their melting points. Adding hints of narrative to the mix, Susannah Biondo-Gemmell’s halved porcelain figures in chunks of lava, laid carefully on their sides, oscillated between blobby hollow abstractions and elegiac reliquaries.

Ling Chun abstractly invokes the subject of gender in teasingly organic wall reliefs cheerfully adorned with spattered pastel colors, enigmatic orifices and plaits of colored hair. The diminutive works of Jennifer Ling Datchuk, meanwhile, from her Making Women series, wryly incorporate tiny wigs of real human hair in varied hues into dainty porcelain discs suggesting hand-wrought make-up brushes, cookies, wafers or nipples–willfully feminine confections for consumption.

Jami Porter Lara’s stately, black-glazed jugs of pit-fired foraged clay are particularly notable in the way they conjure a spectrum of unexpected references, from a uterus to a pair of fists clutching a pipe, to, what exactly: an alien vacuum cleaner? Claiming a space between the sacred and the mundane, she melds the banality of soda bottles with the solemnity of funeral urns, all the while flaunting prominent screwhead nozzles. Her works project sculptural stature without ever minimizing their identity as vessels.

The allegorical possibilities of ceramic were perhaps most potently interpreted by Saint Louis-based artist Kahlil Robert Irving, whose installation, titled Protest: 1883 / United States vs. Harris (Part of the series Undocumented) (2018), formed the centerpiece of the museum’s third floor. At once so subtle it could be breezed over, and physically expansive, at five by five by 12 feet, the work offered an array of hundreds of black glazed stoneware vessels of diverse shapes, set out on a raised wooden platform at roughly eye level where they can’t all be taken in at once. (The scaffold brings its own allusions, from viewing platform to gallows). I took the work to be a prose poem to blackness and a striking allegory of individuality and collectivity. Unpretentious in its language and almost hiding in plain sight, Irving’s silent, querying multitude proves haunting. At once traditional and provocative, nuanced and declarative, it attests to the durability of ceramics as a vehicle for contemporary sociopolitical commentary, even while parading its all-too eloquent fragility.

The post From the Ragged to the Glazed, the Distilled to the Distressed: A Survey of Ceramics in LA appeared first on artcritical.

September 10 to October 29, 2016
537B West 23rd Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 675 7525

Pimples, cinnamon rolls, and a mountain man making paintings in the nude are some of the kinds of imagery found at Rebecca Morgan’s exhibition of recent paintings, ceramics, and works on paper at Asya Geisberg Gallery. The exhibition is titled “In The Pines,” and that is the exact feeling you get when viewing Morgan’s work since all the pieces seem to come out of an off the grid culture. Purposely made to be humorous and grotesque, Morgan presents hyper-detailed representations of stereotypical Appalachian Americans.

The ceramics included here expand on her earlier work in the medium, which she previously exhibited at the gallery in 2014. Her raku sculpture Pajama Jug (2015), with its elaborate and intricate caricature of a head, and its gonzo look, echoes the two-dimensional media. All of the dozen ceramic jugs are figurative with similar anthropomorphic appearance, splayed teeth, and bulging eyes but are individuated too. Each one’s uniqueness leads one to wonder what their backstory is and how they came to be. Moreover, their reference to alcohol and its effects makes a veiled reference to promiscuity and licentious behavior found throughout the exhibition’s images.

Drawing on influences such as R. Crumb, Francisco Goya, and MAD Magazine, with an ice-cold splash of Dutch style — e.g. Pieter Brueghel, Hans Memling, and the Van Eycks — Morgan shakes the bottle and pours out a delicious mixture of exaggerated bumpkin-looking characters. This is evident in Family Reunion (2016), which depicts a trio of all-American country folk indulging in a buffet of cake, soda, corn, and Cheezies Puffs snacks, some of which are served on a matriarch’s saggy, bra-less breasts — yummy!

All of the manically detailed complexity and bright color of Morgan’s work may make viewers envy the pair of awesome shades worn by a stoned young man in After Work Sunset (2016). Although the characters are made comically freakish, Morgan’s cartoonish renderings are imbued with a proud sense of charming guilelessness and self-acceptance. In a 2015 interview with Priscilla Frank for The Huffington Post Morgan says, “These characters are blissfully unaware, unruly, wild, and untamed. They are off the grid and free and not affected by anyone or anything’s influence and I’m very attracted to that concept.”

Morgan uses her crazy bunch as models to show what life could be when guilty of sin. Wandering Smoker (2016), a beautiful drawing, shows a close-up portrait of a strabismus man puffing on a corncob pipe. Rendered in graphite on paper, it’s tame compared to the bright paintings, with its precise hard lines and features, but is wildly drawn to give it virility and ferality. This picture is a break when trying to figure out exactly where Morgan was coming from. It is the perfect portrait of a normal man from the country enjoying a nice unhealthy smoke from a handmade pipe.

Viewers may wonder, however, if these works are too grotesque and belittling of America’s rural citizens. The imagery has the superficial appearance of objectifying and stereotyping country folk as brutish, over-sexualized, and drug-addled lunatics whose lives include a surplus of over indulgence. Nonetheless, most of her characters could easily be transferred to a stereotypical depiction of Brooklyn: beards, beer, anachronistic clothing, promiscuity, self-indulgence.

In the painting Plan B on Easter Sunday (2016), a woman with garish turquoise eye makeup, extends her tongue lasciviously, taking a birth control tablet on it in the manner of a sacrament. Elsewhere, in Creeper in the Grass (2016), a maniacal perverse man voyeuristically spies on a full-breasted blonde woman passed out in a field of daisies. Between the two of them, which join the narrative and portrait aspects of the show, and serve as bookends in its organization, Morgan provides a host of interesting characters for viewers to contend with. Her work is funny, exciting, crude, and skillfully made. Although it may make the viewer feel wrong, it is totally right — a guilty pleasure.

The post Hillbillies in Chelsea: Rebecca Morgan at Asya Geisberg appeared first on artcritical.

March 24 to May 1, 2016
143b Orchard Street (between Delancey and Rivington)
New York, 212 533 4670

In their two-person installation at Louis B. James Matthew and Katy Fischer have created pieces that evoke another time and place, one that does not and cannot exist. While Matthew’s paintings attempt to capture the complexity of an impossible environment in representation, Katy’s ceramics suggest a whole that is not real. These are works that aggregate, excavate, and re-collect the indifferent details of today and yesterday, and that also re-imagine them in a playful and inventive disorientation.

Functioning as vibrant windows, the bright, unadulterated colors of Matthew’s paintings are points of natural illumination in the austere whiteness of the gallery. In canvases suffused with swiftly applied swaths, atmosphere is communicated in simplicity. The linear division between two blocks of paint serves to illustrate a horizon and convey the sensorial saturation of a landscape. These abstract compositions are ambiguous cross-sections of the natural world in which our perspective is never made clear; viewers are left with the uncertainty of whether we are in it or on it, above it or below it. Nothing can be as it should, as you expect it, in a representation of landscape where the horizon is made vertical.

The artist exploits the spatial coding of found materials to disrupt the comfortable aloofness of the gallery space. Paris, 1907 (2015) engages viewers corporeally by pressing a chair seat, the place meant to hold a body, against the wall, as one’s actual, upright flesh exists as floor in relation to the chair’s legs. A painted canvas is suspended from the bottom limbs, presenting a slanting line between straw-yellow and a cool brown. A window onto a sloping hill? Turned earth? An abstract painting? Self (knowledge) and for Cathy (both 2016) provide a more generous contrast to the sense of inversion created by Paris, 1907, opening onto the viewer in a way that evokes action; spines of books prompt one to read, a mirror presents the opportunity to view the work and the gallery from a position otherwise impossible. Altogether, these painted structures are simultaneously spacious and claustrophobic, engaging a viewer’s physical presence while subtly dominating the gallery’s limited space. Rather than existing as an oppressive force, however, these sculptural works present fragmented images, flattened awkwardly into a confusion of fleeting sensations and orientations.

While Matthew’s paintings recode the gallery in relation to a viewer’s body, Katy’s ceramics discourage interaction. Although painstaking in their idiosyncrasy and handmade precision, these miniature works resist the viewer’s temptation to slip them easily into a pocket or to handle them absentmindedly between thumb and forefinger. The components of the Shards (2016) series demand care and attention for their own preservation but also for yours; implications of intimacy are interrupted by fine points and rigid forms. Arranged in systems that are suggestive of an order that is not revealed, these various pieces come together as a puzzle that lacks direct correspondence.

Katy’s ceramic compositions layer the unexceptional relics of daily life with the overbearing operations of exhibition.The fragments, some recognizable, others invented, are a confusion of scale in which figures reminiscent of a miniature traffic cone and a scaled-down scythe are placed beside those of a solitary die, a fishing hook and a screw. In spite of their familiarity, these recognizable pieces are given no pride of place above the unrecognizable geometric slivers and chips that cluster in the spaces between. These ceramic objects adhere to the logics of sea glass and arrowheads, serving a purpose that has since been forgotten or made obsolete. Presented in rows on pedestals or on a wood-and-Plexi vitrine — in manners particular to museums with their attendant overtones of classification and determination — the ceramic components seek to preserve that which is not precious. There is a certain illogic to creating objects that are never meant to be complete, especially ones such as these that seem to memorialize the litter of contemporary urban spaces in a medium that could endure for centuries.

In both bodies, the mode of presentation comes as a point of rupture rather than stability in the relationship between the works and the space that they occupy. In suggestive symbolism and their rootedness elsewhere, these ceramics and paintings fit uncomfortably in the gallery, drawing attention to the unreality and emptiness of such a space. In the awkwardness of their occupation, these works provide the viewer with an escape route into the impossible space that they themselves are dreaming of.

The post “Inventive Disorientation”: Katy and Matthew Fischer at Louis B. James appeared first on artcritical.

In the preface to The White Road: Journey of an Obsession, Edmund de Waal quotes Melville’s famous phrase from Moby Dick, “What is this thing of whiteness?” This connection to Captain Ahab’s literal and symbolic quest for a white whale is apt, for in his ambitious new book, de Waal sets out to track the origins of porcelain production, traveling to China, then Dresden and finally his homeland, England. We follow him up and down literal hills of porcelain mining and production to seek the origins of three talismanic objects: the famed Monk’s Cap Ewer, said to be the first porcelain object made in China; the Tschirnhaus cup, the first piece made in the West; and the William Cookworthy tankard, the first true porcelain made in England.

These three works become de Waal’s Holy Grail and it is no surprise that in the preface he declares himself a pilgrim—although certainly no novice. His writings on ceramics are well known and he is the author of the Hare with Amber Eyes, the best-selling book that also pursued the complex stories that lie behind certain objects, in that instance his family’s collection of Japanese Netsuke. De Waal is a leading British ceramicist whose works in porcelain have been shown internationally. In the course of his global search for information about porcelain, de Waal speculates about on his own love of white clay, with flash backs to his beginnings as a potter and musings on a life spent hands deep in porcelain’s magical whiteness. Stories of great collectors, connoisseurs, inventors and clay entrepreneurs fascinate de Waal because on some level they are stories of fellow obsessives. He recounts their tales with refreshing directness, often with a humorous bent, bringing them to life on the page as idiosyncratic humans as well as historic figures.

With so much historical material from which to construct his narrative, there are times when his book begins to feel as encyclopedic and sprawling as Moby Dick, but it is spared the tragic mania of Ahab for at every turn de Waal delights in the information he is gathering. He remains an enthusiastic explorer even when the wealth and complexity of the subject threaten to overwhelm him.

We commence in Jingdezhen province, China where over 1,000 years ago, ceramic production began. Here de Waal climbs his first hill, Mt. Kao-ling, the “High Ridge” where kaolin was mined for imperial kilns. Two minerals are necessary to porcelain: petunse, known as porcelain stone, supplies the translucency and hardness of the clay body while kaolin, or porcelain clay, is critical for plasticity. As de Waal records, wherever there is porcelain there is first the twin search for these elements, then a period of experimentation, trial and much error. Petunse is not hard to find, but kaolin is. By 1585, the hillsides of Mt. Kao-ling were latticed with mines pulling up the valuable mineral. Such was the Chinese love of porcelain that as early as 1554, the Jiajing Emperor could send an orders to the imperial kilns for 26,350 bowls with dragons on them in blue, 30,500 places of the same design, 6,900 cups and more.

De Waal’s second hill, as he calls it, is his journey to Dresden, where the “Tschirnhaus cup” was made for the Elector of Saxony, Augustus the Strong, through the combined efforts of mathematician and philosopher Ehrenfried Walther von  Tschirnhaus and an inventor named Bottgen. It was a modest production in comparison with Chinese porcelains. But as de Waal sets out to illustrate by weaving together the stories of these men with Augustus II, who became elector in 1694, this object represents the origin of Meissen porcelain. De Waal has fun connecting the development of the West’s first porcelain to the appetites of a powerful ruler who, in his own words, suffered from “la maladie de porcelain, die Porzellenkrankheit.” Augustus inherited a royal collection of around 15 items but by the time of his death had collected 35,798 pieces.

The third journey delves the complex story of the birth of English porcelain. Here de Waal seeks the completion of his Holy Grail by tracking down the origin of a tankard made by William Cookworthy, dated March 14, 1768. In this section, many stories collide and interweave, including early colonial American history, for some of the first white clay in England was imported from Appalachia where the Cherokee had located and mined white clay that they used for making pipes. The indefatigable de Waal tracks down the various overlapping endeavors of merchants and clay entrepreneurs, including Josiah Wedgewood whose creamware production in Stoke-on Trent would become Britain’s most famous ceramic industry.

Keeping track of these journeys can be challenging, but whenever de Waal dwells on particular pieces of porcelain, his writing soars. At one point, for instance, he discusses the differences between Japanese and Chinese porcelain, focusing on the tradition of Kakiemon ware. Here his in-depth knowledge of porcelain and sensitive looking results in a stunning passage. He writes: “The colors of Kakiemon are dense and rich and clearly delineated with the blue of the night sky, carmine reds, yolky yellows and a purple that is used for painting peonies and actually has the velvet bruise of a peony.”

While some might be content with this physical description, de Waal extends his looking by considering the significance of the motifs. “The images are much closer to the dynamic spaces of an ink painting of a landscape than you would expect in a pot.” He then connects this type of surface decoration with story. “There is no attempt to tidy it up or repeat bits of decoration to set up rhythms. It is image, a story, and it is emptiness.” Finally, he concludes the passage with the personal declaration: “This is what makes this kind of porcelain so irresistible. The quail at the scattering of millet is focus and greed and not-being-clever and everyone gets that. And come to think of it, the phoenix is just a courtesan being oh so special off and about.” (p.152)

Moments like these take us back to the personable, curious first-person narrator of Hare with Amber Eyes interrogating history with a lively fresh perspective. In many ways, this is de Waal at his best, evoking the voice of the personal essayist, what Montaigne, father of the genre, called the “accidental philosopher.” A good essayist must believe as Montaigne asserted that “every man has in himself the entire human condition.” It is this belief that allows a writer like de Waal to take us on his long seemingly esoteric quest and trust that he will find communion with his readers, making his tale our own.

Edmund De Waal. The White Road: Journey into an Obsession. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). ISBN 978 0 374 28926 3, 417pp, $27

The post A Holy Grail: Edmund de Waal’s Pilgrimage in Porcelain appeared first on artcritical.

As a stunning show of new work by Arlene Schechet opens at Sikkema Jenkins & Co in Chelsea, we offer this review of last year’s retrospective at Boston’s ICA as a TOPICAL PICK FROM THE ARCHIVES

June 10 to September 7, 2015
100 Northern Avenue
Boston, MA 02210

Working within a notoriously hierarchical art world where ceramics have often been marginalized, Arlene Shechet prefers to describe herself as an installation artist who makes objects, rather than, say, a ceramicist or a sculptor. It is an intelligent way of holding ground. Her beautifully paced survey show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston, “All At Once”, gathers together two decades of deft, imaginative and fearless work.

Her art is by turn, humorous, poignant and playfully strange. From the outset we find her in conversation with those West Coast artists who, from the late 1950s and ‘60s onwards, were determined to push the boundaries of clay. Breaking with craft tradition, they redefined ceramics enabling it to be both painting and sculpture at once. The deconstructive element of some of Shechet’s clay works dialogue with Peter Voulka’s 1990’s series ‘Stacks’, for instance, energetic, rough re-assemblages in clay that were confident and masterful in their abstraction. Likewise, Shechet’s bold command of color nods to Voulkas’s student Ken Price’s bright acrylics and dense sensuous forms as well as the delicious pop palette of painter and former ceramicist Mary Heilmann. Bucking trends towards theory-driven work, on the one hand, and monumentality, on the other, whether in the sculptures of Jeff Koons who with Italian artisans reproduced rococo porcelain pieces, but of pop icon Michael Jackson, or the new German photographers with their dizzying digital possibilities, Shechet has maintained her artistic integrity by steadily working through the most elemental of materials, undeterred by its limitations of scale.

All At Once displays chronologically and with choreographic flair how Shechet explores formal complexities across diverse materials, whether paper, glass, porcelain or, particularly in the last decade, clay. Evolving through her highly skilled works is the repeated use of splicing, stacking, and vessel as symbolic form.

Opening the show is a series of heads and figures, roughly approximated Buddhas slathered in colors, daubs and drips of plaster. Though in sharp contrast to the classical Buddha image of burnished gold perfection, these off-beat Buddha forms are nevertheless presented in the round, encouraging one to walk around them in a circular fashion as if visiting a Buddhist temple. Madras Buddha, 1997, is patterned in a cheerful plaid of red, pink, orange and lime, whereas Raga, 1999, has blooming splotches of blue, dashes of black and snaky grays. Buddha heads with wry titles such as“Collective Head”, “Head on Head”, or “Head that Happened”, sit atop concrete pedestals dribbled with plaster like candlewax, resembling her seated Buddhas in their semi-formless, paper maché appearance.

Shechet furthers her interest in Asia in her series, Once Removed, 1998, casting Abacá paper onto molds using blue-prints referencing real locations. Twinned vessels are stacked and re-imagined as stupas, the top with lush ink patterns recalling blue and white porcelain, its companion a white plaster blank.

Target (Gyantse and Diamond Mandalas), 1997, a two dimensional paper work reminiscent of mandalas, and stupa floor plans, has lines delicately bleeding cobalt blue that are both radiant and dense at once. Other works are of indigo or inky blue flooded paper in reverse, allowing the white areas and lines to emerge and glow.

In Building, 2003, titled as a verb and noun, Shechet splices and re-stacks varying vessels, again inspired by stupas. Presented high like a skyline, dark, smoky glazed vessels at either end fade to pure white biscuit porcelain at center. This austere installation, a personal response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, evokes a quiet despair. More buoyant is a 2004 series of large crystal vessels of pearly luminescence including Bubble Up, Drip Drop, and Cushion, in which cleverly inverted curvilinear shapes are stacked or doubled inside one another to a point of delicate balance. They exhibit a dynamic tension between crystalline perfection and fluidity of form.

At times Shechet’s ceramics can seem like creatures dredged up from the darkness of deep ocean floors. What I Heard, 2007 has two symbiotic bulbous forms glazed matt gray, the amorphous surface and velvety finish interrupted by orange aorta-like vents and pockets of shimmering bronze. Using as support a steel stool, Shechet continues her stacking theme, the base integral aesthetically and conceptually to the whole. Her use in these works of raw or painted wood plinths, steel frames, concrete slabs and kiln bricks demonstrates complexities by juxtapositions of color, texture, and form. In Sleepless Color, 2009-10, Shechet shifts her attention to coiled clay, manipulating it into a state of unruly leaning. With its multi-colored kiln brick base and cracked wood pedestal, the piece reaches a point of ungainly, yet unforeseen grace. Now Playing, 2015, shows a skinny white metal frame beneath a hunk of white painted hardwood with missing angled chunks, topped by a precarious pile up of softly bent ceramic bricks in a bubbling white glaze. The whole effect is complex, contradictory yet formally satisfying, Shechet displaying her relish for materials and her penchant for brinkmanship.

Shechet was able to explore a delicate side of her sensibility in her 2012-13 residency at the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory, Germany which saw works of surreal tender moments underpinned by a fascination with the industrial processes of porcelain production. Deliberately inverting expectations, she favored molds as finished forms, or experimented with splicing and re-assembling traditional house designs. Redefining notions of the historically revered material referred to as ‘white gold’ Shechet included dribbled and stained glazes, vases with buttery fingerlike indentations, and the use of extruder blocks made from porcelain waste as worthy forms. We see this in the wonderfully titled Gangsta Girl on the Block, 2012, a headless, armless figurine in a beautifully patterned dress, leaning alert on white gridded stacks that stand aloft like stereo speakers at a reggae block party. After the Flood, 2012, is a pile up of carefully calibrated porcelain presented as if it were detritus: bases of vases, handles, fluting and, unexpectedly, a tiny cut off classical foot, atop a plain upended factory mold bowl. Elsewhere, manic laughing 18th and 19th century Buddhas sit near gently crumpled vases and a glitter disco ball.

Shechet inventively weaves alongside her own works historical Meissen figurines and tableware, creating a lively conversation between periods. Characters such as Dr.Bolardo ca.1738, with rakish hat and moustache, unnerving red lips and pink lined cape, seems to dance on thirteen plates, while a female figurine lies in a dessert stand with an upside down teacup and a blissful smile on her face. A Head of Vitellius ca.1715 in red stoneware, looks sideways and impassively at the room as if unfazed to find himself there. By the entrance is a silent film on a loop, Meissen Porcelain! The Diodattis’ Living Sculptures at the Berlin Conservatory ca. 1912-14 with costumed actors and fluffy greyhound playing traditional figurine tableaux. As a link between the far past and Shechet’s work, it acts as a charming welcome, and on the way out, farewell to the show.

The post Unruly Grace: Arlene Shechet in Boston appeared first on artcritical.

University of Derby
February 21 to March 28, 2014
Markeaton Street
Derby, DE22 3AW, +44 (0)1332 593216

Contemporary Applied Arts
April 10 to May 31, 2014
89 Southwark Street (between Great Suffolk and Lavington Streets)
London, LE1 0HZ, +44 20 7436 2344

Born in Derbyshire in 1938, Emmanuel Cooper was one of Britain’s foremost studio potters, whose expansive interests also led him to prominent roles as an art critic, broadcaster, author, political activist and teacher — most recently as visiting professor of ceramics and glass at the Royal College of Art. Cooper moved to London in the early 1960s to study with Gwyn Hanssen, setting up his own Westbourne Grove workshop in 1965. The decision to remain within the concrete vistas and glittering lights of the metropolis, eschewing the rurality of traditional pottery, was in large part a response to his social and political needs as a gay man, which in turn informed his professional pursuits and his potting. In doing so Cooper set the tone for a life dedicated to individual and creative investigation, rather than convention.

“Emmanuel Cooper OBE, 1938-2012, A Retrospective Exhibition,” a traveling show recently at the Ruthin Craft Center in Wales and Contemporary Applied Arts, London,brings together examples from throughout his 50-year career, beginning in the 1960s during his time as a production potter, through his final years when he experimented freely with hand-built forms. At the heart of the exhibition are the porcelain and stoneware vessels for which Cooper is perhaps best known, and that convey architecturally his environmental interests and even the characteristics that defined him.

Superlative pieces include stoneware bowls from the 1990s and 2000s, in volcanic glazes of blue, turquoise and cerulean that look like ancient ceramic calderas. Handling them, if one is fortunate enough to do so, is an immense pleasure because it confirms the potency of their physicality and object-ness. They evoke both the astronomical and the quotidian — vast cosmological star fields, but also the pitted detail of coarseurban surfaces. A bowl from 2005 in white-blue plutonic glaze rises from a modest circular base, its sides opening out at a steep angle to a graceful, wide rim, lending a sense of volume that far outweighs the actual dimensions. These bowls inhabit space so confidently that, like celestial bodies, they seem to possess their own enigmatic atmospheres.

Other works, such as a lean, high-spouted jug of elliptical design, containing in its front edge all the nobility of a ship’s prow, are glazed in cascading rivulets of light grays or whites upon darker ground, sometimes tinted with eddies of reds, yellows or blues that appear fluid. They are reminiscent of those tantalizing geological remnants on distant planets that could indicate where water once flowed. Closer to home they echo one of Cooper’s consistent motives taken from city life: lights reflected in the tarmac of rain-soaked London streets. This was an experience of color in fluent motion encountered by him many times on his motorbike during nighttime rides home from a bar, an opening or a lecture. The nature and effects of water are a theme throughout Cooper’s oeuvre. A quiet yet pivotal aspect of these works is the subtly handled relationship between structure and texture, where the simplicity of elegant, balanced lines permits the eye to move unhindered across rugged, prismatic crusts.

Elsewhere, smoother porcelain bowls — stem and traditional — range from bold daffodil yellows to softer oranges, pale blues, and whites, often with flecks of varying color floating upon glassy surfaces. The rims are sometimes distinguished by a thin line, as can be seen on a stem bowl of delicate pink with gold-yellow perimeter (made in the 1990s), or a liquescent bowl of light blue, circled in red brim (from the 2000s). While the stem bowls in particular are redolent of organic forms and although their clay is from the earth, the intention of the work itself is not of the earth, but drawn from an urban existence.

Hand-built porcelain tea bowls from 2010, constructed with strips of clay, the joins visible beneath the glaze and the form less concerned with the wheel’s precision, evince a strong sense of investigative play, showing that Cooper’s industrious nature remained undiminished toward the end of his life.

During the early- to mid-2000s I lived with Emmanuel Cooper and his partner David Horbury, at their Chalcot Road home, behind the cluttered cornucopia of their Fonthill Pottery shop on the ground floor, which was rarely, if ever open, and operated more as display and storage space, which disappointed passersby. Emmanuel’s studio was in the basement, a sacrosanct part of the house that I became familiar with. We used Emmanuel’s pots and plates daily, washed them, stacked them, and once or twice accidentally broke them. Eating from them greatly enhanced the sense of occasion, whether a pedestrian meal or one of his famous Sunday night supper parties, while also raising a strange dichotomy — using works of art that were collected by museums, sold at auction and published in exhibition catalogs, in the functional, unfussy realm of our daily rituals. Drinking from the deep, translucent layers of a Cooper mug, the base lost under dark tea, I often thought that there were not storms contained within those cups, but entire galaxies.

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Are we experiencing a summer of love for ceramic sculpture?  In the last couple of months there has been a critical mass of shows by sculptors that exploit, in vessel-free form, the timeless medium with zany, inventive, lusciously glazed and chromatically exuberant results on view in New York. We’ve seen exquisite essays in eccentric dexterity from Kathy Butterly at Tibor de Nagy; sumptuous, monumental biomorphs by the late Ken Price at Matthew Marks; restrained yet insouciant clay reliefs by Joyce Robins at Theodore:Art in Bushwick. Not to be missed in this rich, sweet vein, in a somewhat under the radar gem of a show at a stunning little space in Williamsburg, Ventana 244 at 244  North 6th Street on the corner of Roebling, through June 14 — is Californian ceramic sculptor Annabeth Rosen in her second New York outing since 2010.  These monumentally goofy tours de force of constructional complexity and formal singularity include sculptural personae that are as defiantly present as they are elsusive or ambivalent to characterize.  A garden gnome that  could a scholar’s rock; a Guston painting come to life that is also an explosing of loo rolls and fruits; and in Mallo, 2013, a crackle-glazed and cracking up (what a riotous conceit) molten snowman who is revealed to have a heart of bubble-gum.  DAVID COHEN

Annabeth Rosen, Mallo, 2013.  Ceramic, 14 x 13 x 12.  Courtesy of the Artists and Ventana 244

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