BARTON ART GALLERIES
Recent Works
MARK GORDON Recent Works
Essay by Dr. Elaine Marshall Photographs by Ron Sowers & Gérard Lange Designed by Gérard Lange
BARTON ART GALLERIES Box 5000, Wilson, NC 27893 252.399.6477
The Hands-on Art of Mark Gordon Surprising, various, elegant, edgy — all could describe Mark Gordon’s current exhibition, which offers a glimpse into what the potter/sculptor/builder is doing at this stage of his career, ten years after coming to Barton. From the vessels and other ceramic pieces that grace the periphery of the main gallery, to the rugged chain-works, to the striking installations in the rear gallery, viewers familiar with Gordon’s work will see how his art continues to evolve, while newcomers can enjoy discovering the technique, formal range, expressiveness and wit the artist brings to diverse media. Depending on where one looks, one can find pieces that allude to a variety of stylistic impulses: traditional pottery and brickwork inspired by Gordon’s travels abroad, classical forms, modernist “found objects,” post-modern fragmentation. Pieces can emphasize functional, sculptural, architectural, or abstract qualities — sometimes in combination. They might juxtapose or harmonize countervailing energies: centrifugal/ centripetal, masculine/feminine, yin/yang. But in every instance, essential qualities inform this collection of work, regardless of style or medium: technical skill; aesthetic curiosity; delight in the serendipitous accident; and spirited engagement with the materials, forms, and forces that activate Gordon’s hands-on art.
Glazed Vessel with Hemispheres
EARTH-WORKS (Wheelthrown Vessels and Clay Sculptures) Every art, in its primary medium, favors one of the senses, and in that fact exhibits and affirms the values and capabilities of its sensory, sensual beginnings. Clay art affirms the tactile. Each wheelthrown vessel or hand-built form embodies a living encounter between materials and the artist’s hands and vision. But the hands have priority, as clay responds to, and in its final firing, remembers the muscular strength that turned it on the wheel or the tangent pressures that shaped coil or slab to new form. Before he loves the finished pot, the potter loves contact with slip’s ooze, clay’s malleability and plasticity, its leather-hard toughness, glaze’s fluency, the kiln’s heat. He knows the hard science and embraces the chemical mysteries of this most basic earth-stuff. His tactile acts fuse raw matter with the creative consciousness of touch.
Encrusted Vessel
In its mix of classical vessels, hand-built clay objects, and hybrid pieces, Gordon’s ceramic work affirms the subtlety and variety of his contact with clay, as well an intuitive and conceptual grasp of his craft’s processes and its cultural, historical — even pre-historical — sources.
Tall Neck with Ashes
The elegant traditional vessels, sleek-skinned or encrusted with hemispherical knobs, evoke ancient Greek and Eastern Mediterranean forms. Replicating protuberances on some of these, for instance, recall the fertile profusion of egg/breast shapes adorning the Artemis of Ephesus. On others, small lids reproduce the onion-form found on the domes of St. Basil’s and Hagia Sofia. Like the Grecian urn John Keats addressed as “thou bride of quietness” and “foster child of old time,” these vessels communicate with the mute eloquence of antiquity as, simultaneously, they substantiate Gordon’s contemporary clay aesthetic. Encrusted Vessel and Glazed Vessel with Hemispheres provide touchstones. In form, Encrusted Vessel asserts the purer blend of classicism and the modern. Gordon describes its Grecian contour and volume as resulting from “the interface between centrifugal and centripetal forces of the wheel”: its shape materially embodies the turning that created it, incorporating (literally, giving body to) the breath that inflates its inner volume. The vessel’s skin is also quietly striking. Delicate ochre and gray-black tones emphasize the form’s rotational forces, creating striations reminiscent of geologic layering or planetary atmosphere viewed from space. Its crusty matte surface suggest the possibility that
this vessel has been newly unearthed from some site remote in place and time. Though recognizable as a traditional form similar to that of Encrusted Vessel, Glazed Vessel with Hemispheres evidences an involvement with clay that begins to join the wheelthrown with the modular. Here, the pristine line and volume of Encrusted Vessel are interrupted by rhythmic spherical bumps — suggestive of clustered eggs or grapes or other globed forms — implanted on its surface within a rough aggregate of clay and sawdust. The black glaze on the lip and ribbed neck contrasts with the coarser textures of the spheres and the grout-like wet clay matrix. This vessel nevertheless preserves the classical shape within the spherical nodules that extend and pucker its contours. Chip away that crust and we would find, we imagine, the smooth vessel intact underneath. Raku Vessel with Hemispheres mirrors the basic form of Glazed Vessel with Hemispheres, but with a coarser pumice-like surface of ashy hues. Other vessels provide variation to the more classic lines and surfaces of Encrusted Vessel. Saturn, a slendernecked vase with the high gloss of anthracite veined with white, and Villendorf, its companion on the
Spindle-topped Wire-wrapped Jar
pedestal, a smaller three-tiered piece richly glazed in dark brown, relate to the “oil-spot” or “hare’s fur” sheen of Japanese temmoku glazes. Particularly striking is Burnished Urn, a beautiful Moorish-inspired onion-domed funerary urn whose mottled black and taupe calcine finish retains the atmospherics of its sagger firing. Gordon created surface interest by burnishing the leather-hard clay with a spoon so that it would take on the subtle hues of smoke. Similar in shape to Burnished Urn, Spindle-Topped Wire-Wrapped Jar results from wrapping the bisque vessel with copper wire prior to its raku firing. The result is an unpredictable skin shaped by the interplay of melting copper and molten glaze whose pattern resembles asymmetrical spider webbing or drizzled icing. Gordon’s traditional vessels, even when elevated by their classical feminine lines into objects of contemplative beauty, retain a familiar sense of utility: they are instantly recognized as urn, vase, bowl. Other pieces strongly resist the appeal to conventional aesthetics. While these hybrid forms are identifiable as vessels, their aggressively masculine modular action dominates the values of beauty and use. Bowl of Mixed Geometries and Bowl with Pyramids both recollect the irregular surfaces of
Burnished Urn
Villendorf
Saturn
Raku Vessel with Hemispheres
Cuboid Bottle
Erizo / Spike Sphere
Glazed Vessel with Hemispheres, but in Bowl of Mixed Geometries, Gordon has embedded angular cubes as well as the almost threatening pyramidal spikes that jut from its base. Bowl with Pyramids intensifies that dangerous angularity. Completely encrusted with mold- generated, projecting pyramids, this form unsettles our easy sense of “bowl” as a smooth, concave structure for cradling liquid — a disorientation reinforced by Gordon’s continuing the exterior corrugation to the interior. While these vessels begin from wheel-thrown clay, their final form in effect denies/defies their wheel-turned origins to assert an aesthetic of built modularity. Gordon’s modular approach appears outright in Torqued Pyramid Wall Section and Ochre Pyramids, clay sculptures built from a series of diminutive clay pyramids assembled to suggest the archetypal geometries
Torqued Pyramid Wall Section
of the monumental Egyptian tombs. Gordon describes these pieces of kiln-fired, alternating layers as the wallfragment of some archeological pseudo-building that has undergone the effects of geological erosion. With Erizo/ Spike Sphere, Gordon shifts modularity from architectural to biomorphic associations. Constructed of elongated pyramidal pieces, this spiky sphere acquires a vaguely biological shape.
Bowl with Pyramids
Phalanxed arranges 46 matte-glazed goblets into a triangle, evenly spaced and hierarchical. This design brings an added dimension of austerity and achromatic clarity: pallid gray and bone-white goblets rest on a bed of sparkling black sand, which in turn is thickly sifted onto a white pedestal base. Absent color, the piece becomes a simple, direct exercise in form. Each goblet shares basic structural elements — bowl, stem, base — but is unique
Phalanxed
in silhouette. As a modular piece, Phalanxed binds the curvy particularity of each goblet within the aggressive linear positioning to create a kind of Mars/Venus tension (Mars, the god of war; Venus, the goddess of female energy). For Gordon, the line of pale goblets is evocative of ghost-soldiers, the ancestors. Slabs A and B, hanging on an inner portal wall between the main and rear galleries, further demonstrate Gordon’s curiosity and delight in experimenting with materials and processes. These rough squares — one incorporating color, the other more monochromatic — were inspired by the artist’s encounters with unexpected fragments of disused hardware — a washer, bolt, or nail. Beginning with wet stoneware scrap clay combined with sawdust, perlite, and nylon fiber, Gordon pressed the mixture onto a bed of salt crystals, copper shavings, rust scale, glass fragments, pyrometric cones, small pottery shards, and metallic found objects. The ceramic and nonclay materials were asymmetrically arranged on a wooden board in an aleatory pattern, the front of the piece remaining hidden during drying. The resulting abstract patterns, exposed only after undergoing the kiln’s transformational incandescence, vibrate with an action-painting energy.
Slab A
Slab B
CATENARY LINKS (Chain-based Pieces) Depending on scale and context, chains evoke images of tensile, metallic strength — chain mail, chain-link fencing, shackles, ship anchors — as well as delicacy and beauty — the exquisite catenary draping of finely wrought necklaces. Metaphorically, they suggest the rigid, enchained logic of causality, the relativity of connective forces (as in “the weakest link”), and serially linked processes (food chains, chains of events). Gordon’s chain-based work draws on such intrinsic and imaginative properties, inviting us to see linkages that might ordinarily escape awareness. These pieces explore chains as physical objects, as utensils, as formal shapes, as means of connecting, spanning, and suspending. Chains embody fundamental artistic relations between part and whole, segment and line, line and volume. As metal work, they bear witness to the tactile strength of the metallurgist and the alchemical forces of foundry and forge, just
as ceramics does to potter and kiln. With chains diagonally suspending a massive iron-forged spear above a laid-brick base, StrongArms II gives the impression of a sentinel at the gallery entrance. Gordon created this medievalesque object (one can imagine it hanging on the wall of a Gothic castle) from solid iron at the Kohler Company’s foundry in Wisconsin. The shaft was cast from an eight-foot fluorescent light bulb; the spearhead fabricated in a unique mold made from an industrial crane hook attached to some carved hard foam, which was then sand/epoxy cast and poured with 2550-degree-hot molten metal.Too heavy to lift, this aggressive shape suggests for Gordon an indirect statement on belligerence and the will to act on that impulse — but with the in-built factor of excessive weight, and the restraining chains that suspend/defer its use, rendering it a mere object of contemplation.
StrongArms II
At first glance, Iron Arabesque appears as the cast-off, forgotten detritus of some abandoned industrial warehouse, the coarse ferrous surfaces of each link showing the weathered rust hues of slow electrochemical decay. On closer inspection, an object so crudely commonplace as to deflect notice begins to disclose its surprises. The individual hooks, while appearing massive, sinuously curve and taper like Arabic calligraphy or Celtic runes. Irregular hookand-eye linkages make for odd linear twists that meander unpredictably, their jumpy movement fracturing the piece’s overall linear form. Gordon poured the hooks as individual modular units from molten metal; by not grinding them, he allowed the jagged fragments of the metallic mold seams to jut out and break up the smooth outer and inner curves. Also, these hooks include the cast letters “MFG” to signify both the artist’s initials and the process of their manual sand-cast “manufacture” during Gordon’s sculptural residency at Kohler. Iron Arabesque
In Amorphic/Morphic/Pseudo-morphic, Gordon allows gravity to create the chain-and-hook catenary that visually and metaphorically links the central morphic piece to the other two. As a curve of natural repose, the catenary takes its distinctive shape from the weight and inherent geometries of the chain suspended between the two clay elements. In starkest contrast, the amorphic clay mass defies form in appearance and in origin. In appearance like the by-product of volcanic spewing or a random chunk of meteorite, it was born of a 1986 kiln accident when combustion gas overwhelmed and fluxed iron-enriched clay. The pseudo-morphic ceramic cylinder aspires toward reproducing the chain’s form. Constructed from a mold taken of the hanging chain, it approaches — without fully realizing — the definiteness of its chain origins, whose link-shapes remain echoed in the fired clay. Grounding the piece is a brick patio base Amorphic / Morphic / Pseudo-morphic (like that of StrongArms II) — recently part of the Case Art Building entrance walkway that was retrieved following the July 2009 site renovation for the new Theatre Building infrastructure and landscaping.
STRUCTURING SPACE (Installations) Entering the back gallery gives the feeling of stumbling upon an unexpected, eccentric construction site. Assembled from found, often discarded, objects and building materials, these installations extend the sculptural sensibility evident in Gordon’s ceramics and chain-based work, while constructing spatial experience on a larger, architectural scale. Installations do not simply display objects as detached or disengaged from the space they inhabit; the space itself becomes a central element in the work. While constructed of familiar, ordinary elements, their configurations represent nothing familiar; their function derives from no recognizable utilitarian need. In Gordon’s hands, these installations communicate strong formal (often geometrical) features, as well as a conceptual emphasis, typically communicated through the verbal play, and interplay, of the works’ titles.All depend on the viewer’s active engagement to complete the perceptual and imaginative transformations each installation makes available.
Arco Colgado / Hanging Arch
In Arco Colgado/Hanging Arch, Gordon takes inspiration from the implied torus-shape of an oversized discarded section of galvanized steel heating duct. Wrapped in brown craft paper and suspended from a three-inch twisted ship’s rope, the duct acquires the quality of an enormous arcing pendant, perhaps a fragment of Brobdingnagian jewelry (recall the giants of Gulliver’s Travels). The piece evokes a monumental space, suggesting dimensions more expansive than those immediately seen. Like some of Gordon’s chain pieces, this installation employs the rope’s catenary curve, as well as its loosely fraying ends, to wed massiveness with delicacy. The alteration of industrial object to ornamental form carries over to the duct’s interior where its abrasive black insulation appears tufted with aluminum buttons. Even the lyricism of the Iberian title aids in the transformation.
and blue-glazed ceramic cogged spheres protrude slightly out of this mass of tabs, visible at the open top of the tetrahedron, as well as through its sides. In the back corner of the space, the tetrahedron’s triangular geometry is repeated in a smaller wood-and-glass container filled with more tabs and knobby spheres. This element — which seems almost an architectural fragment embedded in the wall itself — extends the use of the space, its materials and clean lines echoing the main suspended feature. Both suggest the force of gravity at work: the tetrahedron’s slender tip, suspended a mere two or three inches above the ground, points to the earth’s gravitational center, while the small form rests solidly on the floor.
Gordon’s quirky title draws an analogy between looking at this piece and observing the activity within an ant farm whose glass walls simultaneously Ant Farm continues Gordon’s interest in wood-and-glass interrupt and expose to view a normally hidden suspension pieces like those shown in two poster-size space. In Gordon’s Ant Farm, the glass panes serve as photographs at the gallery entrance. In this new work, windows into the interior spaces they create, allowing massive weathered beams span the horizontal width glimpses of the ceramic cogs buried within. Interest of the rear gallery. Gordon has looped chain around also comes from the way the slithery, anarchic tabs fill the ceiling beam, suspending from it a mahogany and the volumes, threatening to spill over the geometric tempered glass tetrahedron containing what must be boundaries created by wood and glass. The piece plays thousands of silvery aluminum pop-top tabs. White- on the aluminum tabs’ intrinsic qualities: their metallic
Ant Farm
Anaconda
Peak / Peek / Pique
lightness and reflectivity, their modularity, their almost liquid ability to flow and inundate.
except for the rolled material and some peaked creases at each end of the long strip. The work’s title (and its verbal/visual pun on “peek”) hints at the perceptual shift Anaconda, a wall-mounted piece, employs the natural required of the viewer — to imagine looking down on a curvilinear property of 60 feet of exposed copper wire roof-top — and serves as a reminder that the experience to create this elegantly sinuous serpentine form. Sixteen of art always requires a perceptual shift. There is also small aluminum clamps intimate vertebral structures something drolly subversive about positioning a peak that support and augment the line’s undulating power. on the floor to pique interest. By rolling the sheeting At the snaky “head” and “tail” (either end could be to expose the writing on its underside, Gordon adds either), a few threads of unraveling wire tendril around another layer of verbal-play: “Warning! Fire Hazard the central cable, casting delicate helical shadows. The During Installation/ For Professional Use Only By a wall’s white expanse provides a perfect field for this Certified Roofing Torch Applicator.” The warning serves bulging biomorphic curve, whose innate movement can as a humorous reflexive commentary on the professional be more immediately felt when walking the length of it, quality of Gordon’s installation, which, thankfully, did not and heard in the winding syllables of “anaconda.” require the application of a roofing torch. Peak/Peek/Pique, probably the most minimalistic and least assertive of the exhibition’s installations (Anaconda would be a close second for minimalism), reveals Gordon’s sometimes witty play with perception and space-relations. Spanning the floor-space between the openings into the rear gallery, this piece could almost be overlooked. Gordon has taken a strip of dark gray rubber roof-sheeting (its color so close to that of the gallery carpet that it almost blends in) and laid it flat over a section of angular ductwork pieces. That’s it —
Thanks to the following for assistance and/or materials used in the current exhibition: Stan Corbett of Corbett Designs; Jeff Charles of J & G Recyclers of Wilson; Wilson Glass Company; Bonnie LoSchiavo; Susan Fecho; Gerard Lange; Chris Wilson; Ron Sowers; Wesley Pridgen; Max Gordon.
Mark Gordon A native of Rochester, N.Y., Gordon serves as an associate professor of art at Barton College in Wilson, N.C., where he has taught in the art department since 1999. Gordon has presented over 100 lectures and workshops in 19 states and seven foreign countries. He has been recognized with numerous awards and grants. He has held numerous art residencies across the nation as well as in Caracas, Venezuela; Cairo, Egypt; Madrid, Spain; Jerusalem, Israel; and La Romana, Dominican Republic. Gordon was a Fulbright Lecturer at the Facultad de Artes, Universidad Nacional in Obera, Argentina in 1991. Gordon has presented over 100 lectures and workshops in 19 states and 10 foreign countries. He has been recognized with numerous awards and grants. Gordon’s graduate studies culminated in a Master of Fine Arts degree from Ohio State University. Of his educational pathway, Gordon muses, “When you combine Plato with swimming, it can result in unexpected ceramic inspiration.�
Director of Exhibitions GĂŠrard Lange Gallery Assistant Bonnie LoSchiavo Gallery Interns Bobby Buffaloe Michelle Perez Ben Yansom Staff Hanna Cannon Alyssa Damroth Briana Frazier Cherise Santoriello Jasmine Tinsley
Mark Gordon Recent Works Virginia Thompson Graves Gallery & Lula E. Rackley Gallery Exhibition Dates August 24 – September 18 Opening Reception August 30, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m.
BARTON ART GALLERIES Box 5000, Wilson, NC 27893 252.399.6477 The Barton Art Galleries are located in the Case Art Building, near the intersection of Whitehead Avenue and Gold Street, on the campus of Barton College.