selfsame: Ashley Lyon by Nick Kuder

selfsame

Ashley Lyon selfsame robert c. turner teaching fellow

Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University Cohen Center for the Arts Gallery Alfred University, School of Art and Design October 9 – December 4, 2014 Division of Ceramic Art, School of Art and Design New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University Alfred, New York

Ashley Lyon selfsame October 9 – December 4, 2014 Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University Alfred, ny 14802 ceramicsmuseum.alfred.edu Cohen Center for the Arts Gallery Alfred University, School of Art and Design 55 n. Main Street Alfred, ny 14802 art.alfred.edu/facilities/cohen.cfm ashleylyon.com This catalog was produced by the Division of Ceramic Art with generous financial support provided by The Marcianne Mapel Miller Fund for Ceramic Art, Alfred University, Alfred, ny. © 2015 Division of Ceramic Art, School of Art and Design Alfred University 1 Saxon Drive Alfred, ny 14802 nyscc.alfred.edu Catalog design · Nick Kuder Gallery photography · Mike Fleming Additional photography · Ashley Lyon Essay · Rachel Herman Catalogue coordination · Anne Currier, Division of Ceramic Art Printed by St. Vincent Press, Rochester, ny All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission except in case of brief annotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. isbn-10: 0984007865 isbn-13: 978-0-9840078-6-8

The Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art at Alfred University houses nearly 8,000 ceramic objects. The collection is distinguished by holdings of significant Asian and European ceramics as well as ceramics of the ancient Americas. This broader context of worldwide ceramic creativity and history, a history representing thousands of years, serves the museum’s focus on modern and contemporary American Ceramic Art featuring work by the great masters — Duckworth, Glick, Karnes, MacKenzie, Price, Woodman, Voulkos as well as the renown Alfred University ceramic art faculty. Unique to the museum is the collection of artwork by the Alfred Ceramic Art Division’s mfa graduates, which provides rare insight into the ideas and techniques that are shaping the future of the art form. The Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art provides a rich educational opportunity for Alfred University students across all disciplines. It offers to the broader public a view of the beauty as well as scholarship of a timeless art that is flourishing today in our world of international cultural awareness. The Cohen Center for the Arts was created in 2009 through the generous gift of Michele and Martin Cohen, parents of Adam Cohen, (bfa, au ’03). The Cohen Center Gallery at Alfred University is located at 55 North Main Street in Alfred, New York. The Gallery’s primary focus is to exhibit the work of Alfred University alumni, faculty, and visiting artists. The Cohen Center Gallery is a tool for teaching and learning opportunities; students assist in all facets of the exhibitions, gaining hands-on experience in arts administration, community development, marketing and public relations, design, and management.

the robert chapman turner teaching fellowship initiated in 2006, the Robert Chapman Turner Teaching Fellowship is a three-year position within the Division of Ceramic Art in the School of Art and Design at Alfred University that recognizes an emerging artist in the ceramic arts. The Fellowship provides studio time, access to fabrication facilities and teaching opportunities in a supportive environment that promotes the importance of making and the exchange of ideas across genres and among students and faculty. The Fellowship is named in honor of Robert Chapman Turner (b. 1913 – d. 2005), a distinguished American studio potter recognized for his functional pottery, sculptural vessels and inspired teaching. In 1949, Bob earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. From 1949 to 1951, Bob taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he designed and helped construct the pottery studio. Bob returned to Alfred in 1951 and taught ceramics in the School of Art and Design from 1958 until 1979. The book Robert Turner: Shaping Silence: A Life in Clay, published in 2003, celebrates his spiritually resonate life and career. The Robert Chapman Turner Teaching Fellowship is made possible by an endowed gift to Alfred University from Marlin Miller (au ’54).

recipients of the turner teaching fellowship 2012 – 2015

Ashley Lyon | MFA 2011, Virginia Commonwealth University

2009 – 2012

Heather Mae Erickson | MFA 2004, Cranbrook Academy of Art

2006 – 2009 Chris Miller | MFA 2005, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Here is what you need to know about peopling a room and twinning oneself i. here is what you need to know

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Ashley Lyon is one of my favorite people on the planet; whatever I write will be filtered and refracted through my love for her as a person and my devout respect for her as an artist. It makes me twitchy to try to put my thoughts into words, even though our friendship has been codified by putting thoughts, impressions, dreams, desires, inspirations, motivations, complications, obstructions, confusions, and epiphanies into words. But I want you to have an idea of what we talk about and where these forms and figures come from and what I think and feel about them. Also, it might be helpful to tell you that I am an artist too, but that I do not work with clay. In fact, I know next to nothing about rendering in clay or sculpting. I make photographs and think about how to fill a 2-d frame informed by both space and time, whereas Ashley imbues a figure — or part of a figure or sometimes an object or sometimes an object divided into discrete parts — with grace and the sense of a lifetime. Ashley makes her work meticulously by hand, from memory, and often spurred by people she knows or things she sees in the world that catch hold of her, deeply. She makes things to discover new and more expansive limits for herself; she makes to give her internal, existential questions external form. Ashley and I met when we were both artists-in-residence at Anderson Ranch in the fall of 2007. I remember that we were sitting in the cafeteria talking about how she grew up in sunny California with lemon-streaked hair and an intense body consciousness that all women have but that pre-teens in California feel exponentially, like gravity on Jupiter. Part of her fascination with the body, how it holds so many of our anxieties and is the vessel of beatitude, seems to be borne out of that. She grew up looking so intently for perfection while dwelling on, and, I suspect, learning to love, the imperfections instead. When we met, Ashley had just spent three months at another residency at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana. All she wanted after getting her bfa was a studio with unfettered access and no interruptions. So, at Anderson, she’d taken over an impressive swath of the ceramics studio with hand-built figures of Jesus from cradle to grave, an unswaddled Jesus in the crèche (Fig. 1)

and a life-size sculpture re-imagining Hans Holbein’s 1522 painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb made in fragments (Fig. 2). I was working in the photography and new media studio, and she asked if she could show me her 4 × 5 and medium-format negatives. She had a few questions about exposure and scanning the film and would I mind? She had been making figures specifically to photograph, placing them in a landscape and then destroying them. Even though she was feeling her way with the mechanics of the medium, her images were raw and urgent as only the work of someone selftaught could be. Ashley was also, as it turned out, an adventurer, so we took long drives to Ruedi Reservoir, where we passed a small church named Howdy, and an even longer drive to Arches National Park near Moab, Utah, to see the landscape change and to see what we looked like dwarfed in it. Driving for her was like eating; she devoured what she saw on the road and brought remnants back into the studio. ii. how to people a room A few years later, when Ashley was in graduate school at vcu, she came to visit me in Chicago and brought along a slew of images to edit and organize for her mfa program’s publication, Curious. They were mostly works-in-progress made in her studio with different cameras, including these Polaroids that were so murkily lit as to feel dangerous. Stacks of unbodied legs piled on top of one another extended from the cinder blocks next to them (Fig. 3); a pile of skulls that looked like the remains of a Village Idiot meeting gone horribly wrong grinned on a tabletop; and a pair of dismembered arms wrapped in floral twill and cradled by plastic evoked for me, the outsider to the ceramics studio who wasn’t thinking about needing to keep the clay moist and malleable, an unfortunate girl recently dredged from a nearby river. She told me stories of Rodin’s studio, where studies of hands and feet filled drawers, and how these images had effervesced in her memory. My most favorite thing that she has ever given me is a pewter cast

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of her grandmother’s two fingertips (Fig. 4). It is maybe 1” cubed and has a reassuring heft. So, maybe the idea of a sculptural synecdoche, or having the part stand for the whole figure, has grown out of necessity: a clay figure is made piece by piece, and then assembled whole, seamless in the end. Ashley has on occasion lopped off an extremity to deny that figure its totality; but more recently, she’s been exploring how the part can often and powerfully conjure the entirety. How much — or rather, how little, or which specific part of the figure — needs to be present in order to make us, the viewer, assemble the rest on our own? While wrestling with the idea of making a complete, life-size gospel choir for her mfa thesis show, she couldn’t find the way to do it in the manner originally envisioned (which, by the way, was stunningly ambitious but not logistically feasible). The desire continued to percolate, though, and she kept pushing onward, with an aim towards presenting a version of this project in the exhibition marking the culmination of her three-year tour as the Turner Teaching Fellow in Ceramics at Alfred University. Ashley and her longtime partner Ian McMahon bought and renovated a church in Hornell, New York, at the outset of her fellowship; together, they have turned the sanctuary into an exhibition space called The Belfry and the downstairs that must’ve housed countless bingo nights into a studio space. It has taken me years to fully realize, though it was apparent right from the very beginning, that she’s continually immersing herself, both in her work and her home, in religious iconography informed by a contemporary, humanistic secularity. This meaty duality is at the heart of her search as a person, as an artist, for grace. The solo exhibition selfsame was mounted in two very different spaces, each with its own timbre and investigation, on campus. The Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art was transformed into another, to my mind more reverential, space. With pieces arranged cross-like and natural light suffusing the space through tall, arched windows, the aura was of a church on Sunday morning. Rich, dark risers made out of Wenge wood were designed to stop visitors upon entering. The room, deceptively spare, was

peopled. Sculpted feet wedged into thrifted women’s shoes acted as an invocation of the singers; mural photographs of sculpted hands reaching heavenward exuded exaltation. The disembodied clay sculptures were positioned in front of stained glass windows at dusk so that the images appear to float in syrupy rose, mandarin, lemon, and cornflower. (The photographs themselves are titled Mr. and Mrs. W. A. Stephens, not so much after the actual people who were instrumental in Hornellsville’s early days, but after the stained glass window commemorating them, where Ashley made the images and which is now her bedroom.) The worshipful congregation took the form of delicate clay ears, pricked up and listening, impaled on thin, metal rods and bathed in cloudy, Neapolitan yellow and pink light. The presence of a choir and congregants was allowed to unfold silently throughout the room over time. After I’d spent a long part of an afternoon alone with the singers and their risers, I could imagine them singing. iii. twinning oneself, or lyon’s lions On her way back from photographing a choir practice during a summer residency at Bemis, Ashley could’ve sworn she drove by a statue of a lion with a tankini thrown over its head in a suburban front lawn (you know, a tankini — one of those swimsuits that is the modest-but-provocative hybrid of a one-piece and a bikini). The image struck her as odd, odd and great. She went back to the studio and started sculpting the lion, face obscured by a tankini delicately rendered in clay. She cast a mold and made a pair rendered absurd, powerless, and blind (Fig. 5). When it came time to leave Bemis, she decided to drive by that house again out of curiosity — she wanted to see what kind of lawn ornament had actually been underneath that hastily discarded swimwear. She retraced her path and found the house again only to discover that the majestic lion was, in fact, a border collie. And, as I type, I hear Ashley’s voice laughing, happy with how the slipperiness of perception and her subversive memory have done her one better than reality.

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The eponymous piece selfsame — the twinned lions remade, this time using black-pigmented clay — has a more ominous and magical quotient. As if guarding an invisible patron, they are positioned facing each other in the main room of the Cohen Gallery, the second of the exhibition spaces on Alfred’s campus. The faces, instead of being covered, are each replaced with an open hole that presumably leads to a cavity inside each figure. Peering into the face of each lion, which is an unavoidable compulsion, brings to mind black holes, oblivion, deep silence. The process of making is revelatory, but it is also a vertiginous and perilous business. Will our twinned selves become guardians and allies? Or will they stretch and extend to the point of collapse and form a black hole? It’s confounding to me that the lions grew out of an unreliable but light, summer memory, that selfsame refers both to Ashley and the figure she makes to understand herself, and that the piece reads expansively enough to hold both contradictory ideas at once. iv. things we lost in the crash Today the leading headline is that 27-year-old co-pilot Andreas Lubitz barricaded himself in the cockpit and deliberately crashed Germanwings flight 4U9525 into the French Alps, killing 150 people. Our world expands and contracts with these catastrophes; all at once, we turn and look at a small corner of the world rocked by the actions of someone ripped from the fabric of society as we understand it. I remember being similarly rocked when Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 exploded over Ukraine, shot out of the sky by a missile launched by pro-Russia separatists on July 17, 2014. As a photographer, I was pulled into the swirling controversy about the manipulation of the image taken at the crash site. Ashley read a story by Sabrina Tavernise in the New York Times and was quietly undone by what was found among the wreckage:

Mundane items of daily life covered the grass. Toiletries spilled out of overnight bags. Nivea cream. A razor. White slippers. A glass bottle of cologne. A maxi pad lay in the grass. A soft blue fuzzy blanket spilling from a red suitcase was caught on a sharp metal pole. A bicycle lay in the grass, practically intact. Blue Blanket, made of pigmented fired clay and cut into 25 gridlike fragments, was installed on the floor of the Cohen Gallery as part mourning, part memory. Here, the blanket stands in for someone unknown and distant but made immediate and keenly felt through these quick fragments of text. The description of the blanket also reminded Ashley of a blanket Ian had carried around as a child, Linus-like; she asked to borrow it to recreate what had been found in the crash’s aftermath. So this piece ricochets from the intimate to the remote and back again. The hard fragments of blue clay look soft, fuzzy, and whole, even, from a distance. Making can be a way to devour the world, to be more in it, to place oneself in it, and, maybe more urgently, to find one’s place in it. The collective body of work in selfsame articulates, at least to my way of thinking, “The work is me. I am the work. It is one and the same.” This resounds with my understanding of how Ashley is in the world; she consumes it, remakes it, and wants to find grace in it. Rachel Herman March 27, 2015

The stained glass window pictured above bears the name of Mr. and Mrs. W.A. Stevens, the original land-donors of the Spencer Methodist Church in Hornell, ny. This building, built in 1895 has now been repurposed as the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s home, studio, and artist-run exhibition center, The Belfry.

This choir music was discovered wedged between the wall joists in the church basement that is now the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studio. The title of the music inspired the photograph to the right.

exhibition statement The form of the exhibition selfsame originated from the unique opportunity to concurrently display works in two anatomically distinct galleries located on Alfred Universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s campus. The title connotes the paired contemplation of being-ness displayed in these separate settings, one as inquiry into objects and experiences related to spiritual quest and existential inquiry and the other through physiological reflection and introspection. The simultaneous doubt and desire to realize the piece Risers, prominently displayed in the Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art, lasted five years and drove me to research local and distant gospel choirs, photograph their performances and sculpt portraits of their members. This became a work reflecting my contemplation on the relationship of spirituality, race, and class in contemporary American society and a consideration of perhaps my own prejudices. Did I have the right to look and render anything I saw? This work expresses my personal consciousness and my considerations regarding the assumptions and restrictions embedded within my own identity or ethnicity and, more pointedly, its privileges. Wenge lumber used to make Risers is ethically controversial for its sourcing practices. My conflicted sensitivity to using an unsustainable material mirrored the struggle inherent in creating the work. The empty risers confront the viewer as they enter the room with a set of questions: Can I sit? Is something going to happen? Did I miss a performance? The work dominates the space and navigates the flow and delivery of the accompanying objects and images. Since a small child, I have been attracted to the conviction evidenced within the exalted gestures and the particular expression of a body overcome with religious spirit. The photographic images displayed in the museum allude to conflicting presence and essence. An enraptured hand, face, or the extreme form of a singing mouth, displayed without sound, can be visibly confused for pain or fear as much as it can symbolize exultation. The installed grouping of work is an articulation of the inextricable tangle of self and other, individual and group, and group as singular entity.

The sculptures and photographs in the Cohen Center Gallery take inspiration from everyday bodies, portraiture, selective memories, and found images and objects. As an acute meditation upon a collective gaze, this grouping reveals a breath of investigations into the ontological boundaries of images and objects. A display of both two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms, this work plays with the potency of physical essence. A viewerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s perception of minute physiological details through her own skin, eyes, ears, and mouth is a result of thousands of years of sensory evolution. Our bodies are physically aware of vast detail through these sensory organs and we are built adept to intuit their input. Close looking and sensory perception are often bypassed in exchange for narratives or illustrations, which register differently in our minds than haptic perceptions and sensations. I deliberately distance my work from illustrative narratives, seeking instead to make the image or object emotionally isolated and compressed through fragmentation. By avoiding the construction of overt narrative, I hope to engage these faculties of realism and the uncanny through the plastic and psychological terrain available through perception and the malleable immediacy of clay. Material presence is a critical factor in the comprehension of these bodies of work. I use material as a conduit to deliver content. By highlighting the simultaneous and conflicting presence of material and life-likeness, I question our physical absoluteness and perception of the world around us, pointing to the construction of our reality. Historically, man has sought to image himself in an attempt to understand what it means â&#x20AC;&#x153;to be.â&#x20AC;? By striving to capture our own image, we give permanence to our reality. These works attempt to illuminate the fluctuating and elusive quality of this reality and the metaphysical that resides in a nameless space between us and everything else, much in the way that art exists between ideas or images and objects and their viewer.

biography Ashley Lyon uses clay material to create objects and images, which seek to create a dialectical relationship between space, viewer, image, and form. In 2011 she received an mfa in Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University and in 2006 a bfa in Ceramics from the University of Washington. Lyon has been awarded residencies at the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the European Ceramic WorkCentre and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and Sculpture Space. She received an Elizabeth Greenshield Grant in 2011 and 2014 and is currently the Turner Teaching Fellow in Ceramics at Alfred University as well as co-founder and co-director of The Belfry, an artist-run exhibition venue in a repurposed Methodist church located in Hornell, ny. The works displayed in the exhibition selfsame were made possible by a significant grant received from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation in 2014. The artist would like to acknowledge and thank the foundation for their continued and generous support.

Cohen Gallery

Schein-Joseph Museum

5–7 Blue Blanket, 2014 fired pigmented clay 5’× 5’ × 3”

34–37 Risers, 2014 wenge, steel 3’ × 30’ × 15’

8–9 Leaning Leg, 2013 photograph 24 × 30 ”

38–41 Mr. & Mrs. W. A. Stephens, 2014 three photographs 24 × 36 ” · each

10 Shins, 2013 photograph 24 × 30 ”

42–43 Ears, 2013   three photographs 18 × 22 ” · each

11 Half a Leg, 2013 photograph 30 × 24 ”

44–45 Cavern, 2012–13   birch plywood, fired clay, paint 36 × 44 × 12 ”

13 Gloves, 2013 photograph 24 × 20 ”

46 Choir (red), 2010–14 unfired clay, plaster, shoes 15 × 30 × 22 ”

14–15 Dress, 2013  fired clay, plaster 40 × 32 × 26 ”

47 Choir (gold), 2010–14  unfired clay, plaster, shoes 15 × 30 × 22 ”

16–17 Monument, 2012–14 terracotta, shoe polish, steel 50 × 18 × 18 ”

48 Baby, 2013 fired clay, paint, pigments, plaster 48 × 12 × 12 ”

18–23 Knees, 2013   six photographs 24 × 30 ” · each

51 Lord, We Have Gathered in Thy Temple, 2014 photograph 20 × 30 ”

24–27 selfsame, 2014   fired pigmented clay, concrete 58 × 22 × 22 ”