“Influences, Intersections and Innovations: 21^st Century Ceramics”

Welcome to the 2012 Ceramics Annual of America, showcasing the remarkable quality and diversity of 21^st-century ceramics. This marks the third year for the Ceramics Annual of America (CAA), a legacy of California’s role in the history of American ceramics.  Ceramic artists, educators and scholars have joined to encourage education and promote awareness of the ceramic arts, sharing and sustaining international connections among collectors and makers of ceramics. CAA is an important point of culmination, an American first, as an exhibition and art fair dedicated to ceramics aesthetics, cultural history and community.

Ceramics in the 21^st century is a lively and dynamic art form with a fascinating history. Ceramic materials, Peter Voulkos has said, are as old as dirt.  Indeed, the evolution of clay is part of the planet’s own formation history, involving the action of wind, water and pressure over geologic time. Human ceramic practice also has deep roots.  In contemporary work we see unbroken lines of influence that reach back for millennia, such as shino tea bowls, anagama wood firing, memorials to the dead.  Ceramic wares supplied essential needs for food storage and service the world around until the 19^th century. Studio ceramics is profoundly influenced by art movements of the American 20^th century: abstract expressionism, minimalism, patternism, surrealism, trompe l’oeil, political and social critique.  Ceramics has flourished in universities, community centers, residency programs and art and industry.  Combining multicultural influences in ceramic art history with the innovations of contemporary practice makes for art both rich and diverse.

The first Ceramics Annual of America opened in 2010 with a gala reception, followed by three days of educational panel presentations, artist demonstrations, video presentations, and children’s art activities, all centered around a museum-quality display of the work of seventy ceramic artists.  More than seven thousand people attended this record-breaking art fair by the San Francisco Bay.  Artists were present to discuss work with collectors and new clay enthusiasts; significant purchases and commissions were made. The sense of excitement was tremendous. At the end of the weekend, it was clear that the world of clay had enjoyed a new and successful gathering.

The scope of CAA is a brand-new development, but in another sense it is nothing new in the field of clay.  Creative communities evolve around this art form in a unique fashion. Ceramics has inherent collaborative aspects that are much like music.  Critique groups, artist receptions, anagama firings (up to ten days long) all provide opportunities to enthusiastically review current work in context, discuss ideas and inspirations and plans for more projects ahead. Different perspectives abound, from academic to avant-garde. I venture to generalize that ceramic endeavors typically consist of a group of people committed to working their dedicated butts off, and CAA is the latest of such undertakings. While not wholly Californian in origin, this is certainly collaboration at its best, California-style. The development of contemporary American ceramics owes much to the San Francisco Bay area, which makes the event at Fort Mason an artistic homecoming.

To get a feeling for the explosive growth of contemporary ceramics, we need to take a look at much quieter times: in 1941 the magazine Craft Horizons was first established, providing a way to see what was being made in clay as well as wood, glass, fiber and other materials. Presented in this craft context, ceramics soon began to outgrow the definition in what would ultimately become a very heated discussion.  In 1945 Carlton Ball helped form the San Francisco Potter’s Association while teaching at Mills College. In 1950, the Association hosted a conference entitled, “What Makes a Potter Good” featuring talks by Edith Heath, Marguerite Wildenhain, Herb Sanders and Antonio Prieto.  Later visiting artists included Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada, Stephen de Staebler, Byron Temple, and Daniel Rhodes. The name was changed to the Association of Clay & Glass Artists in 1997, and ACGA is thriving today.

In 1951 Peter Voulkos was enrolled at the California College of Arts and Crafts for graduate study in ceramics.  That summer, he and Rudy Autio worked with Archie Bray at his Montana brick factory, firing kilns and making bricks in exchange for using the facilities for their own work. Archie Bray was committed to creating an artists’ residency at the brick factory, which began in 1953 and celebrated its 60^th anniversary in 2011 as an internationally renowned program. Also in 1953, Ceramics Monthly magazine began publishing articles, profiles and news exclusively about clay, an important first. The section entitled “Where to Show” took up just half a page in the early years of publication.

Beginning in 1953, Peter Voulkos exhibited in New York and taught at Black Mountain College during the explosion of abstract expressionism onto the American art scene.   In 1959, Voulkos began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.  In 1961 Jim Melchert, Ron Nagle and Stephen de Staebler began studying with Voulkos.  In 1962 Ruby O’Burke, a Mills College graduate who had studied with Antonio Prieto, established her ceramics workshop in San Francisco, which grew to become a nonprofit community arts center offering workspace and classes today.

In 1966 the groundbreaking Funk show was held at the University of California Art Museum in Berkeley. Art historian Peter Selz defined funk as “hot rather than cool, committed rather than disengaged, bizarre rather than formal, sensuous and frequently quite ugly.”  Like the Abstract Expressionists whose response to labels was ‘it’s not that, no, not that, not that’, Arneson and the other ceramic artists in the show initially wondered about this term.  Richard Shaw talks about the terms then in use among the artists: Nut Art, or Dumb.  But Funk stuck and Arneson became the ‘father of funk ceramics’.

In 1971 the Berkeley Potters Guild was formed. In 1972 Studio Potter magazine began publishing articles and reviews focused on the working artist outside of the academic setting.  In 1977 Meyer Breier Weiss Gallery opened, exhibiting the works of Bill Abright, Kathryn Mcbride and Claudia Tarantino.  Virginia Breier later opened her own gallery at Fort Mason, and Dorothy Weiss Gallery opened in 1984. The Oakland Museum of California and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibited work by Robert Arneson, Richard Shaw, Viola Frey, and Stephen de Staebler, presenting ceramics in a fine art context and making it accessible to the public.

In 1986, the California Conference for the Advancement of Ceramic Art was first presented as a collaboration between Arneson and John Natsoulas in Davis, California. The CCACA has continued to grow and now features a three-story annual exhibition, with lectures and demonstrations by a slate of distinguished ceramic artists, and over forty student exhibitions from colleges and universities in California and beyond.  This confluence of creative energy provided fertile ground for the inception of the CAA today.

Ceramic education at college level, which was the entry point for Voulkos, has provided an important historic continuity since the 1950′s. The long lineage of teachers and students now forms a vast tree of connection, with easily traceable branches, twigs and leaves of inspiration and influence. Innovators and educators in ceramics are especially noted for generosity and encouragement in sharing their technical and philosophical knowledge. The CAA provides a fascinating look at the development of ceramics practice through college and university programs.  Some CAA artists are instructors with master’s degrees and years of teaching experience.  Some are pursuing graduate degrees.  The community college system in California is especially noted for its accessibility and its success in preparing professional artists.

The extraordinary innovations possible with ceramic materials, and the expressive nature of the medium, guarantee a creative pluralism which truly characterizes ceramics today. The world of clay has become global, with artists remaining in touch across the world after a conference, a residency, a teaching appointment, a public project, or an exhibition brings them together.  Social media are a daily means of communication in ceramics, making possible the sharing of news, images and videos worldwide.

Explore the exhibition and you will discover work as varied as the minds that made it.  Some work gives homage to the earth, source of clay, with raw organic texture and emphasis on mass, volume, and dynamic thrust.  Industrial processes have become the tools and techniques for some; these vary from monumental terracotta, made on-site in factories, to porcelain slip-casting of minute, delicate forms.  Personal narrative informs many sculptural pieces. Complex surfaces involve exquisitely drawn and printed images. Cultural critique is a focus, informed by the 1990’s theory that all artists are social workers. Some work is intended for pure aesthetic engagement with beauty.  Technical virtuosity can be found side by side with an unrestrained expressionistic delight in the sheer joy of art making.   The 2012 Ceramics Annual of America brings together another impressive group of ceramic artists with practices rooted in diverse cultures, experiences and education from around the world.

“Oakland art viewers get up close and personal with three powerful artmakers.”

At the opening reception for Transfiguration at Joyce Gordon Gallery, I saw paintings and sculptures by an impressive trio of artists: Chukes, Gerald Griffin and Monjett Graham. The opening was RSVP requested and the place was jammed with a lively crowd, drawn by the quality of the work and the opportunity to meet the distinguished artists.

Chukes’ clay sculptures of heads and busts are distinguished by consistent use of subtle, deep value and a melancholy palette. The faces are all stylistically related, looking like family portraits, due in great part to the elongation of the features. Chukes’ work is intended to celebrate African-American and African historic art and culture, and references to stylized masks is an element in the abstraction of his work.  The heads are on long necks, between hands which seem to be holding the faces between them. The introspective response to the works was interesting, as the gallery viewers tended to pause, stop conversation, and take a long look.

This was true for all three of the artists’ works.  Gerald Griffin, a Chicago-based artist who is also a writer and sculptor, had both small and large format paintings on display. His dramatic figures have a strength and sensuous presence, characterized by deep chiaroscuro. The exquisite skill of the painting includes the hand of the artist revealed, with occasional palette-knife swathes of heavy paint that emphasize the gesture of a dancer’s hand, or the texture of an urban building. Here too, the viewers paused, arrested in front of the paintings by their depth and compelling sense of life.

Monjett Graham has made the San Francisco Bay his home for many years, and his latest series of paintings are developed from working with Chinese calligraphy, inspired by SF Chinatown. Monjett taught himself the meanings of the pictographs, and incorporates them into the paintings. The most recent works are now based on the pictographs themselves, writ large enough to break out of the frame of a four by five foot canvas.  The energy and rhythm of Monjett’s work is in the very best of abstract tradition, imbuing color and form with motion and presence; in his artist talk he mentioned using a household mop for applying sweeping strokes of paint. The paintings look as though pieces of the city’s walls have somehow appeared inside the building, and I think Monjett has that effect in mind.

The exhibition runs through October 28 and is well worth seeing. I intend to return for another long look at these works.

“CAA artist on a journey of discovery.”

I was delighted to hear David Zdrazil give a lecture at Mendocino College (1) about his work and philosophy, and intrigued by his keen observation of the inspiration derived from the material in nature.  It has been observed that sculptors in clay would be well advised to “take a shovel to a riverbank” (2)  in order to investigate their own motivation in choosing ceramics for self-expression.

Zdrazil describes his clay work as “a dialog between that which we create and that which exists naturally. A large part of my inspiration in clay art is the clay itself.  Clay that is found “in the wild” can be wet, fresh and slick, or dry, weathered and cracked.  It records layers of time, and marks of action; it is everything ground up and homogenized to form the flesh of the earth.  I’m fascinated by how clay provides a tangibility of the mysterious interactions of matter and energy around us.”

During his presentation, Zdrazil showed a range of images of roadsides, swamps, rivers, deserts and post-industrial fields where he had found clay for his projects.  Wherever he found it, he stopped his car immediately and dug up a bucketful, encountering some ruggedly beautiful locations in the course of his journey. His commitment to the process combined humor, curiosity, and an open-minded view that is clearly visible in the finished work.

Zdrazil creates a kind of geologic history lesson, where formal qualities, iconic patterns and lush glazes are juxtaposed with raw, organic mass,  as if the clay itself had made choices about form, finish and function.  He says, “Like the clay that it is made from, my work is an eclectic mixture, using form and design from different cultures and time periods.  It is visual poetry inspired by geography, questioning what we create and what creates us.”  

1  http://www.mendocino.edu/tc/pg/6048/mendocino_college_ceramics.html

2  Ian Anderson. The Studio Potter, 34/2 June 2006

“CAA artist gets inside the factory at Mission Clay.” 

“CAA artist Michelle Gregor brings together world influences.”

Michelle Gregor recently traveled throughout Europe on a well-developed itinerary to see important work from periods and cultures that historically supported sculpture, especially the figure.  Gregor’s take on this time-honored style of representation is beautiful, fluid work that celebrates humanity in the 21^st century. The power of the work lies in its beauty and its connection to figurative art across time and around the world.  It is a rare pleasure to engage with.

Gregor is a neoclassic ceramic sculptor with a contemporary flavor, inspired by the urban diversity of the San Francisco bay area, and informed by previous travel to Bali and southeast Asia. The profiles of her lovely early works show kinship with the Gandhara stone temple figures of the 4^th century.  Interestingly, Gregor makes not even a nod to ceramic Funk traditions; showing in the very heart of California funk town, she is doing her own thing with grace and quiet power.  The artist’s figurative work is distinctly heroic and robust, with sensuous volumes, lively muscularity and soft areas of vivid local color.

Gregor’s new pieces make a visionary leap from her previous series.  The new figures form a harmonious group, with proportions, gesture and surface beautifully unified.  Gregor has applied the glaze more freely, with exuberant brushwork.  Her palette has expanded with more reds, orange, and light yellow, with delicate shading from light to darker values.  This artist has always been bold in her definitive use of black, which she uses to advantage here again.   A subtle smoothness of the facial features combines with a soft, consistent surface, acting as a perfect canvas for the application of color and value to define each piece as an individual. The life-size figures steal the show completely, despite the appeal and strong composition of their smaller companions in repose. They are distinctly European in sensibility. Their sense of motion is created by full, abstracted drapery that stands in for legs and feet and carries the movement visually down to the floor. There is direction in their gait and purpose in their walk. They are fully self-aware and celebrate that fact. These women are going places, and they know what to do when they get there. We can see them in a plaza in Italy doing the marketing, buying bread in France, or debating the virtues of the newest play in Barcelona.  They are strong and confident, with a sense of their place in the world.

Michelle Gregor distills the best of figurative art traditions worldwide, mixed with contemporary influences, to give us the personal expression of an artist whose first allegiance is to beauty.

by Susannah Israel

“CAA artists exhibit at Black Bean Ceramic Art Center.”

Vigorous conversation is a vital and integral part of art practice for the las cadre group. Five years ago a group of Oakland artists met at the studio of Noelle Nakama for a potluck critique, and we have been meeting continuously ever since. Developing long-term relationships with each other’s artwork brings depth and insight to the critique process.  The insight and generosity of such dialogue is an invaluable tool for creative growth.  (A number of other groups have been inspired to form, such as the Clay Babes of Grass Valley.)  Common threads weave through the las cadre group: seven artists studied ceramics at San Francisco State University, three work at Merritt College, six more work or have worked at the Richmond Art Center.

“Desert Spring” by Elaine Toland

The exhibition was curated by Ruben Reyes and Will Johnson, founders of the Black Bean Ceramic Art Center, and beautifully installed under the direction of curator Albert Dixon.  Upon entering the large, light-filled space the viewer is greeted by Elaine Toland’s “Desert Spring,” a nine-canvas abstract painting in deep greens and reds.  “I paint memories and feelings,” says Toland.  The artist also works in nursing at Stanford Hospital, where she “creates a sacred space for healing” by engaging adolescent inpatients in art.

“Facets” by Tiffany Schmierer

Tiffany Schmierer’s “Facets” series translates the urban visual environment into ceramic sculptures whose twists and turns, vivid colors and hidden surprises are drawn from her life in the SF Bay area.  The artist combines hand-building, printmaking, and relief techniques in unique ways to create a dense, complex megalopolis in clay.  Careful examination rewards the viewer, like getting a glimpse of a hidden door or garden. Schmierer exhibits widely and heads the Ceramics Department at Skyline College.

“Traveller” by Michelle Gregor

Michelle Gregor is a neoclassic figurative sculptor with a delicate, sure hand with the ceramic surface.  Sensuous surfaces gently imbued with color characterize “Traveler,” a life-size ceramic figure leaning forward from its pedestal as if about to descend.  The artist says “sculpting the figure is a beautiful language to practice.” Gregor was recently featured at the Pence Gallery, and is head of the Ceramics Department at San Jose City College.

“Dream Commute” by Sterling Israel

Sterling Israel’s “Dream Commute” uses mixed media on a recycled canvas, an important part of the artist’s commitment to reuse of and nontraditional materials. The artist’s intensive process builds up layered surfaces that create a sense of deep space with complex patterns.  Israel received her MS in Community Arts at University of Oregon, Eugene.  She has created numerous public art works, served as exhibitions director at the Richmond Art Center and currently teaches art at Vallejo Charter School.

“Hearts, Hounds & Howling Moon” by Tomoko Nakazato (detail)

Tomoko Nakazato creates complex narratives with a “Little Boy” esthetic, juxtaposing  anime-influenced characters, animals and detailed landscapes.  These arrest our attention, as if we suddenly recognize a dreamscape or nightmare.  Nakazato grapples with the world’s woes with compassion and humor, as in “Hearts, Hounds and the Howling Moon.”  Nakazato was represented at SOFA Chicago in 2010 and teaches at the Randall Museum in San Francisco.

Porcelain Bottle by Saadi Shapiro

Saadi Shapiro is known throughout the Bay Area and beyond for his expertise in matters ceramic, from clay to kilns.  Shapiro is currently working with different porcelain clays, for their nuances of color and the resulting effects on glaze in response to reduction firings.    The unexpected “gift of the fire” can be seen in the soft blush of red seen on “Porcelain Bottle, White,” combining masterful form with subtle glaze surface.  Shapiro teaches at Studio One and the Richmond Art Center, and runs the Merritt College ceramics studio.  He was recently invited to be on a panel about kilns and firing at the 2012 National Council on Education in Ceramic Arts (NCECA).

“You Are Here” by Jennifer Brazelton

Jennifer Brazelton describes herself as an abstract artist.  Using extrusions and press molds to generate mass-produced parts, she arranges multiple elements in layered, formal relationships. In “You Are Here,” Brazelton frankly declares her intentions, using finely detailed imagery as a mapping strategy that demands conscious examination of our own relationship to our world.  The artist says “I juxtapose the macro and the micro to highlight visual parallels and to remind us that we are structurally connate with the world around us.” Brazelton teaches at NIAD, the Richmond Art Center, CSU East Bay, and Merritt College.

“Someday, Son” by Noelle Nakama

Noelle Nakama’s work uses tranquil domestic imagery with intentionally obscured text and altered wheel-thrown forms to create a sense of mystery.  She addresses the uniquely individual perspective of memory and family history with her series, “Someday, Son.”  Here, four wall-mounted plate forms with graceful silk-screened botanical images are overwritten with cursive text and further blurred by a layer of clouded glaze.  Viewers of the exhibition expressed an intense desire to read the text, underscoring the artist’s message about how communication and memory are affected and even distorted by empirical experience.  Nakama’s work has been widely exhibited, winning the Juror’s Award from Sandy Simon at the California Clay Competition in Davis, California.

“Turning Torso” by Chris Kanyusik

Chris Kanyusik works with figurative imagery, unexpectedly recombined with geometric shapes, using dynamic balance as a key point in his composition.  His figures mix realistic anatomy with unusual finishes such as red house paint.  Kanyusik recently displayed a large group of figures at the 2011 Ceramics Annual of America, where he used the same white paint for both pedestals and pieces.  The flat unification of the presentation conveyed a disturbing sense of the mechanical, holding the viewer at an emotional distance from the work.  Kanyusik teaches at Walnut Creek Ceramic Arts Center, Studio One, and Ft. Mason. He recently completed a two-month residency at the Zentrum Fur Keramiks in Berlin.

“Lifted” by Tom Michelson

Tom Michelson’s large heads are deceptively simple.  The distorted features grin and grimace, their eyes mismatched and even vertical in a neo-Cubist, Surrealist take on the plight of contemporary humanity. Grotesque yet brave, these heads seem to be struggling to hold their integrity in the face of a relentless immutable force.  The intentional nature of this over-the-top expression is made especially clear by the complex, beautiful glazing that gives the works a graphic punch.  Michelson is largely self-taught as a sculptor, and is the founder of Red Brick Studio, a collective ceramic workspace in San Francisco’s Mission district.

“Stay Lovely” by Shalene Valenzuela

Shalene Valenzuela invokes social critique through the visual appeal of vivid color and silk-screened images on slipcast porcelain forms of household objects like blenders and irons.  “Stay Lovely” invites us to examine the message.  Here, an immaculate replica of a sewing machine is used as a canvas for the image of a coy female figure and a measuring tape.  Are your measurements acceptable?  Do you qualify as an attractive female?  Valenzuela has developed her elegantly voiced challenge with careful attention to detail, masterful skills, and a lurking sense of humor that draws the viewer to question our societal roles and expectations.  Valenzuela teaches at the University of Montana, Missoula, and is currently the director of the Clay Studio of Missoula.

 

Susannah Israel is an artist, writer and educator living in east Oakland.  Israel teaches at Merritt College and is currently a studio member at the Black Bean Ceramic Arts Center.

 

“Golden Rabbits” by Susannah Israel

Author of this article, Susannah Israel, is a member of this group and represented by “The Year of the Golden Bunnies” in the las cadres exhibition at Black Bean Ceramic Arts Center.  This playfully animated collection of rabbits and figures made of unglazed terracotta are derived from the traditional Chinese calendar. (We are told that every five cycles (60 years) the Year of the Rabbit is a golden year, showering change and opportunity on everyone, whether born in the rabbit year or not.) The artist’s inspiration for the composition comes from Sandy Skoglund’s installation “Radioactive Cats,” from the 1908s.  Skoglund’s piece is much more menacing, however.  Israel’s bunnies are hopeful and spry, blessed by the golden year.  The speed with which Israel works her medium imbues these bunnies with bountiful energy. – Kathryn Funk, editor

 

Black Bean Ceramic Art Center

561 Emory St, San Jose, CA 95110   408 642-5757

www.blackbeanclay.com

 

 

 

“CAA artist’s work is provocative social commentary.”

“Don’t believe everything you see.”   Quite sensible advice, especially when viewing the work of ceramic artist Shalene Valenzuela.  Her intricate work has its roots in the trompe l’oeil art tradition of visual illusion.  Trompe l’oeil, from the French for “trick the eye”, derives from card play, where a hidden trump card wins the hand.  The genre begins in painting;  Albrecht Durer placed a painted fly on the knee of the Madonna in Feast of the Rose Gardens, 1506,  inspiring this ‘art of deception.’  His work was so convincing that viewers attempted to brush the fly away. Valenzuela’s slip-cast, silk-screened ceramic creations can often baffle viewers who just can’t tell if it’s real.

The artist has exceptional command of her materials, recreating common household objects in clay with uncanny fidelity. Valenzuela deftly employs her unique array of techniques and philosophy to produce thoughtful and challenging work, drawing upon contemporary practices of appropriation, surrealism, and pop art history. Wickedly humorous social satire is the result.

Valenzuela studied image transfer on ceramics with Richard Shaw at the University of California, Berkeley.   Shaw is well known for his liminal work in cast porcelain, which established him as a pioneer in the use of trompe l’oeil in ceramic art.  Committed to the use of clay as his medium, Shaw is also known for celebrating the clay material while making the point.   “My slip cast forms are not merely canvases – they are an integral part in what makes the narrative complete,” says Valenzuela.   UC Berkeley’s substantial place in ceramic art history also includes the teaching of Marilyn Levine,  (1935-2005) whose modernist take on trompe l’oeil deals with the physical presence of the object.  Levine is known for her hyper-real clay constructions, intricate, meticulously executed works which appear to be actual leather jackets, shoes and bags.

Slip casting and silk-screening have in common an absence of evidence of the artist’s hand, according to Andy Warhol, who preferred silk-screening for this reason.  Robert Rauschenberg, introduced to silk-screening by Warhol, liked the feeling associated with replicated images, “ bringing old associations to new experience.” [1]    These meticulous techniques allow Valenzuela to deliver precisely the images we are preconditioned to recognize.

Valenzuela has situated her work soundly within this history.  “I reflect upon issues,” she says.  Her topics are social expectations, cultural precepts, and diverse urban legends. Valenzuela’s everyday people aspire to embody the roles and behaviors that promise acceptance, social status and wealth as a result.  The perfect American life is recorded with clay replicas of mass-produced, common objects.  Anyone can buy them.  They are familiar to both the eye and the hand.  Glue bottles, pencil sharpeners, laundry soap, pencil sharpeners, toasters, blenders – through the repetitive process of slip casting, you can “make a million” of them. [2]

“Stylistically, much of my imagery is pulled from sources around the 1950’s era. Through advertising, common objects were embraced in the most royal fashion, and through television and print, images of the “perfect Americana life” were portrayed,” comments Valenzuela.  Richard Shaw also speaks about his use of trompe l’oeil with slip-cast objects and printed images as a comment about consumer mentality:  “Buy! Buy! Buy!  [3]

The regal presentation of objects is inherently linked to the creation of desire and the imposition of a consumer value system.  Advertising and art meet in the work of the Pop artists, as we see in the late fifties and sixties. “Nobility and grandeur are bestowed on the commonplace: pop bottles and soup cans, ice cream cones and hamburgers… the trivia and paraphernalia of our contemporary world are presented as symbols of our culture.” [4]   Says Valenzuela, “I feel this imagery reaches back to the core of the advertising age, and the ideals founded then still apply to how people strive to live today. I feel even in those times when there was a shiny veneer put upon things, there was always something that it was glossing over.”

Now why would Valenzuela want to look beneath the glossy veneer of American perfect culture?  According to Laura Molina, there is a particular complexity about the  multicultural perspective of Mexican Americans versus the media: “In a culture where nothing happens until it happens on TV, I don’t exist.  As an educated, native-born, English-speaking, fifth-generation Mexican American, there is almost no reflection of me  on television.” [5]   Valenzuela also talks about her early experience with visual culture through personal family images:  “When I was young, I looked at old family photos constantly and conjured up this ideal life my parents had grown up in. As I grew older, and learned the complexities and the contradiction of reality to my innocent childhood impression, I found the idea that a still cheerful image can disguise so many layers beneath.”

Certainly the assumed malleability of the consumer is quite evident whenever 1950’s advertising agencies focused on women.   “Domesticity was idealized in the media, most married women walked down the aisle by age 19.   A majority of brides were pregnant within seven months of their wedding.”   There was also a subterranean political agenda. “Embedded in the propaganda of the time was the idea that the nuclear family made Americans superior to the Communists.  So American propaganda showed the horrors of Communism in the lives of Russian women, shown dressed in gunnysacks, toiling in drab factories, while their children were placed in cold, anonymous daycare centers. In contrast to the “evils” of Communism, an image was promoted of American women, with their feminine hairdos and delicate dresses, tending to the hearth and home as they enjoyed the fruits of capitalism, democracy, and freedom.” [6]

Close reading of Shalene Valenzuela’s works reveals how the artist has juxtaposed images to overturn our expectations by using humor and surprise.   A recognizable ceramic blender, for example, seems just the right size and shape to appear in any kitchen.  Painted on the surface of this routine appliance are some women getting dressed.  But now we perceive these images in terms of the blender.  Female bodies are being laced up and buttoned down, shaped and cut to fit – in this case, by the sharp whirling blades of a blender.  Under this smiling, deceptive veneer of well-being is actually a horrifying version of homogeneity, accomplished by chopping everyone into small, indistinguishable bits, thus: “Blending In.”

Against the wall, a familiar schoolroom object makes clever reference to the American pedagogical practices of conformity, obedience to authority, and repression of individual behavior.  On a perfect porcelain pencil sharpener we see its user depicted, subtly reminding us that this student is also going to be whittled and processed, however painfully, and whatever the attendant risks, by future societal expectations and economic demand.

Valenzuela’s work effectively evokes ‘the union of frivolous form and serious subject.’ [7]  Her complex works exert a strong visual allure, attracting our inspection with narrative detail, brilliant surfaces, and familiar shapes. In this case, the trump card certainly wins the hand.  For these uncannily accurate replicas play upon our own expectations to subvert the very imagery we so readily recognize.   We find ourselves confronting the hidden power of visual manipulation and the pitfalls of facile assumption.  Shalene Valenzuela has an important message for us, which I read as follows:  “Don’t believe everything you think.”

by Susannah Israel

“CAA artist’s work celebrates her ceramics residency.”

 Tea at the Archie Bray, 2002.  This is permanently sited, and I often receive pictures from people who pose with it.  The featured photo is courtesy of Tom Bivins.

Technical info:
Clay –mixed at Clay Biz, based on our beloved Pete Voulkos’ formula. (He used:
half fireclay to half ball clay, then added 10% sand and 10% silica to the 100 lb batch. ) With some modification for red color and green strength, I used:
half fireclay, 25 ball clay, 25 redart clay. Then I added 20% grog to the 100 lb batch.

Intention – The piece is permanently sited at the Bray, so I wanted it to be directly about my experience of summer 2002. I actively sought collaboration with my fellow residents with this in mind.

Contributors:
Terry Geibar, chopped nylon fiber to mix into the batch
Susan Beiner made a plaster mold of Bill Lassell’s* feet, which were used for all three figures. I suppose you could say he’s still walking with them. Or kicking it with them? not much walking going on.
Mika Negishi Laidlaw contributed six clay eggs. (These seem to have disappeared)
Lesley Claire Baker was the model for the elegant figure in the center.
Allison McGowan made the textured porcelain cup the central figure is holding,(with the 2 birds.)
Kowkie Durst made the cup the right figure is holding.
Sean Derry made the cast green apple the left figure is holding, (that the gopher wants.)
I made the third cup, the chickens, figures and animals. Bill helped mix the clay, load and unload the kilns, and he carried everything that was heavy. But there’s more!

Animals:
Baby birds
There was a heat wave that deranged the nesting birds somehow, and four baby birds fell out of their nest, right in front of the summer studio door, and were abandoned by their parent birds. Their nurture was taken on as a group commitment, although Terry thought our behavior was hilarious and made dire predictions about the outcome. We got tropical bird food that we mixed with water to make a sticky goop, and dropper-fed our little foundlings. One died immediately.
The other two survived, getting six to eight feedings a day. Fortunately Mika came in at 6 am daily and Sean, Bill and I were late night workers, so we had it covered. The baby birds cheeped constantly and it was our ambient sound track for the summer.

We gave them flying lessons, perching them on sticks and then suddenly leaving them to flap their wings indignantly. It was slow going but it worked – or instinct worked, and they began to fly all over the studio. It was home and they saw no reason to leave it. They were quite bold and friendly, perching on our worktables to see what was happening, and flying on and off our shoulders. They had an excellent relationship with the baby kitten who was also in residence in the studio.

The kitten:
En route to the Bray, Lesley witnessed the horrid sight of kittens being flung from the car in front of her, onto the freeway. She stopped at once and rescued the lone survivor, a very young, underfed kitten. Named Oliver, he rapidly grew fat and sassy, chasing grasshoppers in the long weeds for hours. He never grew very large, but he was healthy, playful, and companionable with everyone, including the baby birds. When Leslie finished work for the day she would pick him up and drape him around her neck like a black velvet collar. Oliver would regard us calmly from this perch, as he was used to the routine and happy to be going home for dinner and cuddle time with Lesley. He too meandered freely around the studio and especially liked to nap on my foam.

The dog
On July 4th a terrified young dog ran into the summer studio, trembling, and made straight for Kowkie. We gave him water – he drank about two gallons – and mashed potatoes, the only thing we had that even approached dog food. Upon gobbling up all our offerings, he lay down, sighed and fell asleep. A comical aspect of this evening had to do with the complex discussion about his name and how to figure that out. Various names were mentioned in meaningful tones and it was decided that he responded to Jim. Jim the dog went home with Sandra Trujillo, but before bringing him back the next day she drove all though Helena to try to find his home. She noticed he was excited by the approach to a particular street, and then a certain house. She let him out of the car, and watched as he trotted up to the door and was let in. I guess they’ll never know.

Because of these wonderful, collective experiences, the animals of the summer studio all appear in the Tea Party sculpture. The chickens and gopher are the products of my imagination.

It is noteworthy that these pieces have sustained no damage from the extremes of Montana weather, which makes them an excellent argument for the durability of clay in public art.

Susannah Israel

* Bill Lassell, my beloved partner and creative collaborator, died unexpectedly in 2009 and is still much missed. His love, his contagious laugh, and enthusiasm for all things is still with me.

Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts: http://www.archiebray.org/

Tom Bivins Pottery: www.bivinspottery.com

“CAA artist creates a world of abstraction.”

“I juxtapose the macro and the micro to highlight visual parallels and to remind us that we are structurally connate with the world around us”. [1]

Relationships and interdependence are building blocks for Jennifer Brazelton’s work.  She draws inspiration from visual patterns as apparently unlike as maps of San Francisco bus lines, viral colony growth patterns, and machine gears. Order and place in these structures are emphasized like links in any living chain. Organic forms of expansion, like molds, dictate the conversion of separate elements into the dominant structure. Patterns of the urban environment contribute to her organizing principles of visual composition. The mechanical formations hide the hand of the artist. What is revealed is the mind of the artist.

Brazelton makes intricately constructed ceramic forms which re-present and abstract our daily environment. She uses extrusions and pressmolds to generate mass-produced parts, then arranges the elements in layered, formal relationships. Brazelton’s work can be simultaneously apprehended as convoluted highway ramps and as Petri dishes.  Our human point of view oscillates between micro and macro.  Are we in it or outside it? Governed by it or controlling it?  The word connate refers to parts that have grown to form a single structure. Such parts may be dissimilar or even forced together.

This intensive investigation began during graduate studies at San Francisco State University.  For her thesis exhibition, Brazelton took the aerial view from a plane as her point of departure, creating scaled landscapes of fields and cities as seen from the sky. Relationships of size and space, especially hidden aspects, change with distance and perceptual assumptions. The abstracted perspective which allowed new visual relationships to emerge especially intrigued the artist, who says of her passion for travel:  “Long airline flights to Thailand, Indonesia, Micronesia, Laos, Turkey, and Hong Kong provided inspiration in the ever-changing landscapes… connections, shapes, and colors layered over each other.  Rivers and roads became branching trees, human veins, and knots of rope.”[2]

Brazelton describes herself an abstract artist. To abstract is to summarize, to express a quality or characteristic not based on individual elements; in sum, to look at ideas. But how do we look at an idea? In our increasingly sophisticated world, bombarded with visual signals, we have arrived at a point where Brazelton’s approach utilizes common practice.

In 1977, the film Star Wars showed a breakfast scene on a planet “far away”. To emphasize the idea that this was an unknown planet, the family drank blue milk. This was a creative and powerful visual because the film-going audiences of the time did not drink blue beverages. Today in Alameda, the local ice cream store regularly runs out of macapuno ice cream, a similarly startling deep blue.   Multicultural perspectives and shared global technology make for sophisticated world citizens. This is the world in which Brazelton works.

The artist employs abstraction with visual blurring between very large and very small points of view. Repeating patterns, from bacterial colonies to farm fields, show an arrangement of orderly elements whose purpose includes generation, protection and nurture. Brazelton reduces the components to reveal essential elements of the governing structure.

Her highly thoughtful work incorporates aspects of installation and social practice. Brazelton recently exhibited Pieces of What, a large-format installation work, at the Richmond Art Center. The wall-mounted display allowed the artist to arrange a complex pattern of circular blue forms with irregular interiors in formal shapes suggesting a labyrinth. Viewers approaching from the hallway experienced a focusing of vision from the large view to detailed inspection of the color and texture of individual components. Brazelton says:  Color for me expresses emotion/ texture can suggest many things simultaneously.[3] The composition evokes maps, with their implied movement, pathways and destinations. The dissected tubular forms also cross-reference the human lymph system, called a transport system in medicine, with urban railway transit.

Brazelton’s Lamentations series critiques the American practice of war as business, and the unconscious participation of all Americans in the profits of our way of life.  War, with soldiers as the chess pieces for military conquest, has changed very little at the human level, even as weaponry has moved from stones to smart bombs. This is the entrapped aspect that Brazelton addresses. What is war? is it the nightly news? The body count, which was dinnertime viewing fare during the Vietnam era?  When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer.[4] Lamentations: Growing American Culture resembles a giant sunflower. Very close reading reveals that the seeds are discernibly the tiny heads of soldiers in helmets, by the hundreds, meticulously applied. The generic little heads call up our tepid reaction to the annual newspaper listing of their deaths, where each face receives one square inch of newsprint, in a format as ultimately anonymous as Brazelton’s minute castings.

Brazelton exhibited the Neighborhood series at the inaugural Ceramics Annual of America, a new venue for ceramic art at Fort Mason, in 2010.  Much map-based art uses the original cartography, altered but still inherently familiar at a casual read. Brazelton further reduces this, remaking the world in terms of the connection between a baby’s head and an electronic gatepost.

One piece, titled Crossroads, is an attenuated oval shape with three swelling apertures, symmetrically placed, and a saw-toothed red form in its interior.  The color of the red form, its shape and the texture of the wet red glaze, all evoke organic growth. The small spurs on the edge of the red form reveal themselves, on close reading, as baby heads. They are slick and mottled with red, like newborns. Brazelton would accept the most direct interpretation, the natural object as the adequate symbol.[5] At the core of these implied lives is the nurture and protection of the babies inside the gates.  Very real human conditions drive families to choose survival and guaranteed protection through such exclusivity. In recent discussion about gated communities, it was said ‘the people are stuck inside as well as outside,’[6] The quality of exclusion in a high-priced neighborhood has another price for the people dwelling there: by limiting  perceptions to shared socioeconomic assumptions,  privilege becomes self-deprivation of stimulus and change. The most exclusive retreat in the world is found in the manufactured islands near Singapore, quite literally a world of one’s own, which is what Brazelton asks us to consider. Aerial views of the new constructions bear an uncanny resemblance to Brazelton’s abstracted communities.

Brazelton’s process, like the work she creates, is an intricate layering of intimate and monumental structure, fused into a new entity. She says “My creative process is about absorbing and filtering ideas and information. I take bits and pieces of things I like and combine them to make something new.”[7] 

It is important to the artist that the works are beautiful – almost all of them are – and that they meet exacting standards of technical construction and formal composition.  In order for the close relationships between macro and micro structures to prove out, they must be accurately made. The necessity for getting all the details right at this level makes Brazelton a meticulous worker.  She comments on her exacting approach as  “quenching my obsessiveness.”  Although her careful attention to detail is thorough and considered, she remains open to spontaneous evolution; this is no physical tic but a determination to see the idea to full conclusion. The material she has chosen to work with contributes its unique unpredictability: “I love the unknown element, especially the results of kiln firings.  You might think you know what is going to happen, but often it is not what you expected.  This can be both good and bad.  I like the element of chance.”[8]

Brazelton uses abstraction to reveal hidden structures stripped of nonessential elements. The governing structures of our lives can entrap us by providing unexamined, intangible benefits.  Engaging  her detailed work is provocative; we are called upon to exchange casual perception for a more thorough awareness of how closely enmeshed we really are within our environment. To be connate also indicates that dissimilar elements are forced together, interestingly. The layers of such connate structures vary extremely: water in rock, charged ions in soap, soldiers at war. The protected family inside an exclusive community is also confined there.  We get stuck because we are linked through our own social expectations and the practices that have grow to contain us.  Brazelton’s ceramic works locate and examine these hidden relationships, creating a fascinating new lexicon.

About the artist:  Jennifer Brazelton’s work is exhibited nationally and appears in numerous publications.  She maintains her studio at the Voulkos Dome complex in Oakland and teaches at California State University, East Bay, Merritt College, and the Richmond Art Center. Brazelton lives with her husband, artist Tom Michelson, in San Francisco.

About the author:  Susannah Israel is an artist, writer and educator living in east Oakland. She has published extensively since 2001, and was the 2011 Jentel Critic at Archie Bray Foundation.

“The Zen of Creativity.”

Tonight’s reading by Mark Doty is part of a celebration of the Zen Center’s 50th year in San Francisco.  The poet, who told us that he had just gotten off the plane, read from his new works with characteristic enthusiasm, humor and energy.  Soon to be published, What Is The Grass is a book of poems dealing with the eponymous work of Walt Whitman.  Doty explained that he came to feel a connection with Whitman and his work over time, and even with some surprise.  His poems are close observations, almost reports, on the way the use of language conveys intention and emotion.

Mark Doty has been an important influence for me for the past twelve years; I have read, and reread, all of his eight books of poems,  three memoirs and two books of criticism.  He has been elegist for the generation who lost so many of our best and most talented in the devastating early days of the HIV epidemic. Yet his work is mostly composed of insight, delight and celebration, a keen accounting, in clear and human terms, of what sustains and inspires us.

Tonight the discussion turned, perhaps not surprisingly for the setting, to the question of spiritual practice as an inherent part of working creatively.   I left reflecting on how familiar that conversation sounded in the context of the ceramics community.  Visual art conveys intention and emotion in ways that connect maker and audience across time and around the world.  I’m really starting to look forward to our own celebration this coming September.

Susannah Israel

learn more about Mark Doty: www.markdoty.org/

about the Zen Center: www.sfzc.org/