With Sharbani Das Gupta.
Pretty Pictures began in reading the poetry of Charles Wright, especially “Why, It’s as Pretty as a Picture”. A single artwork from this modular series can be as few as three tiles, one of each type. Wright speaks about dark music, the ease of half-things & off-colors settled in “the place inside the place inside the place.” Whispers from the wind to the sky to the horizon put him at ease in “a kind of believing without belief that we believe in” as dusk flows to dawn. Color, mass, & field combine circles & squares in another iteration of the search for one shape that flows back & forth between half-thing & both things. Bulging from the wall, the tiles indicate a state of flux between the spaces that they hide individually & the space of the room, including us, that they embrace collectively.
swell is inserted in traditions of general high relief, tiled architectural decoration & of particular wall-mounted pottery such as Moorish braseros. A CAD drawing is extruded, or swollen, in order to increase the apparent volume suggested by the exterior without increasing the true volume of the interior. The swelling adds more seams to the bowl that is assembled from sheets of clay.
tripelgänger is ceramics in three versions after architectural thumbnail sketches by François Blanciak. Five of the thirty-three groups are shown. A parallel is drawn from Blanciak’s book, Siteless, as ceramics flows through contexts of painting, sculpture, & architecture. Shadowing shows ceramics’ ambivalent relationship with these three, oscillating between distinction & indeterminacy. Meanwhile ceramics’ durability in material & history provides the necessary friction.
2015, Santa Fe Clay, Santa Fe, NM