WET AND LEATHERHARD

A Group Exhibition on the Edge of Ceramics
Curated by Susie J. Lee

January 7 - February 13, 2010
If you can manipulate clay and end up with art, you can manipulate yourself in it as well. It has to do with using the body as a tool, an object to manipulate. -Bruce Nauman Clay and clay-like materials such as mud and plaster are highly malleable and responsive to touch. When the medium is wet, its plasticity registers each and every impression and gesture. When even wetter, the clay becomes a viscous slip, sensually covering the topography of the thing underneath. As it dries, the material reaches a stage of leatherhard, a term apt not only in its imitation of an old belt, but also in its ability to be carved, molded and worn down. In essence, clay is a reflection of behavior and action. Its shape and form is a record of its intimate discourse with the body. And up to this point, the raw material can be slaked down; what exists can be reversed and erased. This state of in-between—a sort of holding pattern—becomes a space where a material can be one thing and also become another, and this ambiguity and slipperiness of form is a potent metaphor. This exhibition is informed by these understandings, as these innovative and peripatetic artists channel the richness of their ideas through the material’s physical properties. Meaning and aesthetics are embodied within these properties. The transformation of material occurs at a variety of levels to obscure or highlight surface, object, metaphor, and perception.

Jim Melchert, San Francisco, CA Predicated on chance, improvisation and change, Jim Melchert’s works are detailed studies in the compositional properties of clay. Over the years, his work has delved into a particular truth of materials, accepting the way things are. Material phenomena such as cracks or flow patterns are clarified and gently intervened. In subtle gestures, they reveal inherent behaviors of clay. The degree of manipulation in form or clay is carefully balanced: “The hand is a big thing in craftwork . . . but it doesn’t mean you’ve got to handle the clay, wet clay, in order to use it as a means of communication.” In his 1972 performance Changes, he and his companions in Amsterdam sit in a room that is hot at one end and cold in the other. They dunk their heads in clay slip and are filmed as it dries. The senses of the participants become closed off from the rest of the world, and familiar geography of the face becomes obscured. ‘It encases your head so that the sounds that you hear are interior, your breathing, your heartbeat, and your nervous system. (It is surprising how vast we are inside.)’ James Melchert served as Visual Arts head at the NEA and Director of the American Academy at Rome. He has been a vital source of inspiration to students and artists in the Bay Area. His work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley, and Gallerie Paule Anglim in San Francisco. Jim Melchert shown courtesy of Paule Anglim Gallery, San Francisco
* * * Kristen Morgin, Long Beach, CA
Working with unfired clay, Kristen Morgin creates uncompromising objects infused with fragility, tenderness, and delicacy. Her degraded sculptures appear to record the reactions of the material in their weathering of time and the elements. As both detritus and precious fragments, these objects conjure a sense of suddenly being discovered after years in hiding. They are noble meditations on the physicality of the body in their negotiations with time, decay and memory. Resisting simplistic nostalgia through its constructed realities and intrinsic impermanence, they question the value and preservation of an embodied history of objects. The three raw clay and painted objects Popeye vs. Popeye, Spy vs. Spy, and Gunhand from Texas stand in close proximity to their non-clay partners (an iron bank, and found books, respectively). In a complex dialogue these objects modify the signifiers of age and wear, question concepts of “facsimile” and “original,” and collapse a perceived ordering of time. Kristen Morgin has had solo shows at Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles and Viento y Agua Gallery, Long Beach. Selected group exhibitions include Trans-Ceramic Art 3rd World Ceramic Biennale, Icheon, Korea; Thing: New Sculpture from Los Angeles Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Because the Earth Is 1/3 Dirt Art Museum of the University of Colorado, Boulder. * * *

Wynne Greenwood, Seattle WA Gliding deftly among the mediums of video, performance, music, sculpture, and installation, Wynne Greenwood searches for self-aware, feminist and queer realities. She scrutinizes assumptions surrounding the female body and its associated language to discover what exists underneath and behind. Terms and agendas are deconstructed as a clever yet innocently inquisitive search for concrete meanings concludes with an impossibility of finding such definitions. Her objects embody a private physicality; whether the end of a table, a painted stripe, or a plaster basket, these masses, edges and corners hint at intimate crevices and curvaceous mounds in the body. Integrating both surface and object, her sculptural works transgress the easy terms that makes something known and labeled. Basket with Punk Spikes, Basket with Black Strap-on, Basket with White Strap-on, (all from 2009) are three plaster woven and painted baskets, and the first also includes punk spikes. Wynne’s mother introduced her to weaving, and in this work, surface and structure are intertwined, as the weave functions as both shroud and support, outside wrap and interior sculpture. Wynne Greenwood’s work has been shown are Tate Modern Level 2: Media Burn exhibition, The Moore Space, Miami, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles; The Hayward, London, UK; the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA, Reena Spaulings Fine Arts, New York; Foxy Productions, New York; The Kitchen, New York, the Moscow Biennale, Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Biennial, New York.

Wynne Greenwood shown courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects * * *

Tim Roda, New York City Tim Roda’s work integrates installation, photography and performance. Traversing personal memories with the recording of a live event, his photographs collapse boundaries of time, calling out deeply ingrained myths with a personal familial history and contemporary narratives. The materials he chooses, paper, wood, or clay, are disposable and re-usable, simultaneously questioning the standard application and usage and embodying poignant metaphor in casual construction. His techniques are also intentionally haphazard, irregular and surprising, capturing the ambiguities and uncomfortable moments in life and recollection. Both materials and construction are valued in its association with the incongruencies of memory and a working class sensibility to adapt and build by what is available. Untitled #7 (2003) is a black and white gelatin print loosely screwed to a piece of plywood. The subjects are the artist’s eldest son, Ethan, and the artist. Tim Roda has had solo exhibitions at Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle, as well as Galerie Michael Janssen in Berlin, Germany, and Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York. He has also shown work in Houston, Toronto, Baltimore, and Chicago in numerous group exhibitions. He was awarded both Fulbright Grant in 2008 and a Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Residency in 2005.

Tim Roda shown courtesy of Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle * * *

Doug Jeck, Seattle WA Doug Jeck’s work employs fractures and fragmentation to comment upon the fragility of the masculine and a negation of the heroic. As a response to his well-known male figures, recent work disregards the highly articulated for spontaneity and casualness in his choice of materials and subjects. He reflects upon the vulnerabilities and tragic-comedic state of the corporeal that inflicts shameless indifference in its endurance of the realities and absurdities of life. Pathetique (2004) is a single channel black and white video of the artist caked in clay slip. Straddling between caricature and animus, he sings wistfully to Dolly Parton’s version of “I Will Always Love You.”

After Muybridge (2007) [detail at right] is a suite of 9 photographs of a clay figure morphing from one frame to the next. Doug Jeck is currently a professor at the University of Washington 3D4M program. He has had exhibitions in New York, Seattle, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco. * * *

Meiro Koizumi, Tokyo Japan Meiro Koizumi’s video works are visceral and psychologically brutal performances, harnessing the strangeness of foreign identity, narcissictic nationalism, social-political agendas and hierarchies of power. In his various locales, he observes the paradoxes of these societies and places them against the backdrop of a struggling male body, often his. His assessment of self is, in turn, humorous and scathing, sinister and tender, and always disconcerting. The works casually throw out the normal strategies of the medium, and to the forefront, they bring an awkwardness and disturbance to the flow of moving images. Melodrama for Men #1 and #2 (2008) are documentations of a one-man performance in both Tokyo and Amsterdam. In the first, Meiro plays Vice Adminral Ohnishi Takijiro, who is known for encouraging the kamikaze attacks in WWII. The image of the lump of clay between his legs is overlapped with his facial expressions and reveals the psychological and erotic behaviors undermining the highly conscious speech. In the second, Meiro embodies a Japanese sex slave who retells her story of humiliation and fear. Meiro Koizumi’s recent solo exhibitions include Dicksmith Gallery, London; Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New Yrok, and Mary Mary, Glasgow; and Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. The Hedreen Gallery in Seattle WA presented a comprehensive retrospective of his work, and he created a site-specific installation for Open Satellite in Bellevue Washington. His recent group exhibitions include "Rehab!" at Stedelijk Museum Bureau in Amsterdam and the "Nanjing Triennial" in China.
Meiro Koizumi shown courtesy of Dick Smith Gallery, London

Sterling Ruby, Los Angeles, CA Sterling Ruby is a versatile artist, working with sculptures, canvas, video, and installations. His biomorphic ceramic sculptures and videos apply a sharp commentary on the structures of engrained institutions and social power. His application of materials serve as challenging metaphors to expose these underlying systems and bring attention to outsiders, urban gangs, transsexuals, and other marginalized groups. He is fascinated with materials that “could record the truncation of gesture, a kind of malleability that got frozen.” His work swings freely between the energetic, emotional, and frenetic and the minimalist and austere, but always focuses on the elevation and transformation of everyday objects as symbols of the tenuous human condition. Kiln (2005) is a lambda print mounted with Plexiglas and Sintra. It portrays a dilapidated and well-worn ceramics kiln. It is the symbol that signifies a decisive end to clay’s malleability and to a larger metaphorical hardening in society and beliefs.
Sterling Ruby’s work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; CHRON at the Drawing Center, New York; and Grid Ripper at Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy. Recent group exhibitions include New Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Dirt on Delight, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Substraction at Deitch Projects, New York; the Moscow Biennial; and Red Eye: LA Artists in the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL.

“Kiln” (at right) from of The Collection of Ruth and Bill True, courtesy of Foxy Production, NY

***

Ben Waterman, Seattle WA   Ben Waterman’s work merges language, text, and personal experience with materials and installations. Meditations and observations suddenly transition to intuitive grafting of divergent materials in a moment of making. Influenced by the fluidity of his travels, creation is expressed as both experience and outcome, and the finality of an object is occluded by a self-conscious resistance to the finished. There is a continuum of what is there and what remains as possibility. Implicit in performances and installations is the belief that sensory experiences are intimately registered through the body and expressed through materials, reliquaries and fragments of these experiences. The five works are a site-specific installation for this exhibition. “Dead Girl's Compass” (2009) is created from cellophane, painter's tape, paint, photo, compass, string. “When a Hand Poses as a Wall,” (2009) and “When a Wall Becomes a Cloud” (2009) are compositions of pencil and paint on paper, painter's tape. “Untitled,” (2009) is a sealed book of drawings, clay, paint, paper. And the most recent work “Tracing,” (2010) is clay carried secretly in the mouth of the artist, upon unfired bricks, fabric, wood, paint, and cinder blocks. Ben Waterman is a recent graduate from the University of Washington 3D4M program. He has studied extensively in Japan and India and has taught at Pottery Northwest and Seward Park in Seattle. He has shown work in Japan and at Drop City Gallery and the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.

WET AND LEATHERHARD

1/7/10

Wynne Greenwood

Jennie C. Jones

Lead Pencil Studio

SuttonBeresCuller

Alex Schweder La

Current Exhibition

LAWRIMORE PROJECT