Kent State National Ceramics Invitational
Kent State University Downtown Gallery 141 East Main Street. Kent, Ohio 44242
Cover:
Liar(s) Ceramics, wood, fiber, housepaint 64” x 22” x 11.5”, 2018
galleries.kent.edu
Kent State National Ceramics Invitational
February 21 – March 23, 2019
Featuring: Soojin Choi, Gabrielle Graber, Michelle Laxalt & Andrew Stansbury By choosing the theme of figuration for the Ceramics National this year, KSU is tapping into one of the oldest traditions in ceramics; for centuries, humans have exhibited a drive to translate their form into materials that can approximate their likeness. And clay, with its metaphors for, and similarities to, the body is an apt material for the job. The artists I selected for this year’s exhibition each make compelling work that uses ceramics and the human form to speak to the complexity and vulnerability inherent to our embodied experience. Absent are the cute, cliché, shallow figures that abound in a field that too often applauds technical virtuosity as an end in itself. While clearly demonstrating mastery of the material, the four artists in this exhibition stray from realism in order to evoke the intangible and ineffable; they combine a degree of realistic representation with fragmentation, abstraction, and invention to touch on human vulnerabilities such as anxiety, exhaustion, longing, and distrust. Gabrielle Graber’s sculpture, Transforming Through Touch, depicts two loosely articulated bodies that blend into one another. Boundaries between the figures are obliterated, suggesting the complex entanglement of emotion, expectations, and memory that two people can share, but are not typically visible to others. The fluid quality of the composition suggests an evolving, unfixed symbiotic relationship between the figures. With academic degrees in both painting and ceramics, it is common for Soojin Choi to combine two-dimensional images into her three-dimensional compositions. In her piece Liar(s), Choi presents three life-size figures that share formal similarities with Marisol’s signature assemblage figures constructed with blocks of wood. Each of Choi’s figures has a highly stylized female head sitting upon a rectangular body that features photographs of a female figure printed onto fabric. These photographic panels take on characteristics of x-ray film; as photographs they imply a veracity that contrasts the generalized, sculptural body parts and seem to give us a more intimate glimpse at the figure. This is reinforced by the fact that the crux of the work—the shift of gesture from front to back—occurs in these panels. Andrew Leo Stansbury’s own body is the figure in his work; he creates photographs that depict his body adorned, concealed, or augmented with ceramic components. Because these ceramic components often have a grotesque bodily quality—suggesting unhealthy growths or internal organs made visible—the resulting images question popularized ideals of beauty and desire. Stansbury presents himself as a representation of otherness, trauma, and suffering. He presents himself as a figure upon which we can project and empathize, asking us to confront the feelings that such an image conjures. Likewise, Michelle Laxalt’s objects strike a potent tension between bodily familiarity and strangeness, in tandem with attraction and repulsion. Her forms have qualities that directly reference the human body’s flesh and fluids, evoking what James Elkins refers to as “visceral seeing” or “thoughtful embodiedness”(Pictures of the Body); her work summons a reaction in the viewer’s own body, engaging both soma and psyche. The robust pink surfaces of Laxalt’s sculptures subtly glisten with life, while the objects’ fragmentation and ambiguity of form make them seem discarded. This push and pull between associations with life and death remind us of the body’s perpetual and inevitable exhaustion.
—Christina A. West, Curator
Soojin Choi Minneapolis, Minnesota Liar(s) Ceramics, wood, fiber, housepaint 64” x 22” x 11.5”, 2018.
Gabrielle Grabe Columbia, North Carolina (above)
Your Body Holds You In Its Arms Graphite on paper, 18” x 22.75”, 2018. (left)
Transforming Through Touch Dark brown stoneware, Cone 6 oxidation, 23” x 19.5” x 9”, 2018.
Michelle Laxalt Atlanta, Georgia (above)
derma (fester) Silk, wool, hair, 2017. (right)
Limb Stoneware, underglaze, glaze, 24” L x 3” W x 4” , 2018. Photo Credit: Eddie Ing.
Andrew Stansbury Morris, Minnesota (above)
Hive Or, You Said I Smelled Like Home Archival pigment print, 24” x 16”, 2019. (above right)
Daub Or, I Feel the Home We Would’ve Had in the Crick of My Neck Archival pigment print, 24” x 16”, 2019. (right)
Sting Or, Sometimes You Just Leave the Stinger In Archival pigment print, 24” x 16”, 2019.
The School of Art Collection and Galleries at Kent State University are ten spaces and a 4400 piece collection located on the Kent campus and downtown Kent, Ohio .
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