Yolanda Spears, “Power to the Pu$$y”

There’s a moment in Gandhi where an Englishman asks the film’s hero what a sympathetic member of the ruling class can do to help those who are struggling (for equity, diversity, access, inclusion, and respect), whereupon Gandhi tells him to go home and work on behalf of his own nation’s dispossessed. His point is clear: real progress cannot be bestowed on the weak by the strong; to truly own it, one has to take it. Now, equity, diversity, access, inclusion, and respect are actually goals copied from a statement by the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA), and it follows that if any of the group’s members are to have real progress in an often repressive artistic environment, NCECA will help find the way. Which brings us to Rebel Girl: You Are the Queen of My World, an exhibition that’s taken over the Finch Lane Gallery this month.

The universe from which Rebel Girl emerged is that of female-indentifying artists. Sex may be anchored in biology, but gender is a product of social, psychological and autobiographical factors. Such a revolutionary understanding takes time to unfold, during which traditional categories struggle for footing. That of female-identifying artist aims to prevent inclusion from becoming lost in the struggle. Thus Rebel Girl was envisioned as a “chain reaction of inspiration,” in which one artist would invite another, who in turn would invite a third, thereby escaping the authoritarian structure of so many art projects. Choosing four diverse individuals to begin the process all but guaranteed diversity among the 13 artists ultimately present.

The success of this approach can be seen in the range of results. Where the chosen artists might have nominated others like themselves—and we’re not told which of them recommended which—no two artists’ works resemble each other the way, for example, glass galleries in the Northwest once filled with Chihuly knockoffs. In Io Palmer’s “Meander”—a name equally apt for wandering paths or intricate ornamental patterns— delicate, spidery botanical elements almost as fine as the wire tracery that coils among them create a garden of tangled stems and tiny flowers that tumble from the wall in coils and spirals that hardly seem possible for clay. At another extreme, the figures by which Kristi Moreno conveys a Latin lifestyle are as compact and self-contained as the culture they reveal without exposing. Titles like “Mua Chula Chingona” employ slang that varies as much between localities as Spanish pronunciation does from one nation to the next, thus allowing curious viewers little more than a glimpse of a sophisticated social order they may admire, but not co-opt.

Io Palmer, “Meander”

Meanwhile, other glimpses of life lived beyond the glare of commercial media come from Joy Okokon’s “Koroba ati Afro Comb” and “Koju Soko ati Afro Comb,” each of which enlarges on an indigenous cultural tradition. That “koroba” means basket in Yoruba and designates a hairstyle that the comb resembles may not be necessary to know in order to appreciate the sculpture, but the portal is opened for the interested.

Two of the more elaborate projects here essentially bookend Rebel Girl. Coming from more traditional sources—literally so, given her elaborate upcycling of found ceramic elements—Lydia Thompson’s three scenes of birds “Flocking” in birdbath-like settings collectively express three existential moods: “Exile,” “Compulsion,” and “Resilient.” The variety of historical periods among the birds, some of which are commercially glazed while others come in simpler forms, is matched by the use of broken shards to make up the ground that underlies them, while their subtitles suggest dramatic narratives of life under extreme environmental pressures. At the other end of the front gallery and with a contrasting approach to making a point, Yolanda Spears “Power to the Pu$$y” advances an opinion on self-possession at odds with the lies told on the public stage by one man to another some years ago. Spears’ fourteen slip-cast torsos, identically molded to combine a classic figure with the head of a house cat, but each glazed in a unique luster, facetiously deny the canard that any one opinion can accurately catalog all women.

Lydia Thompson, “Flocking: Exile”

Of course the same can be said for anyone who claims to possess the unique story told by any work of art. Take, for instance, Kim Dickey’s twin lecterns, each inhabited by a small clutch of chickens. Knowing that one is titled “Gleaning” and the other “Still Brooding,” it’s not hard to see them as a narrative pair, one in which the two still sitting their eggs look askance on the one whose chicks are already garnering an education. But the two works, despite their similarities, are titled and cataloged separately. Here the advocate must yield to the artist in the acknowledgment that his powers of insight are not those of a mindreader. Perhaps, looking at Dickey’s three vases shaped like plants, her intention might be to create objects for contemplation that, like the real world, can only be penetrated so far by human curiosity.

Which brings us to the “BlokashGi Prunck”—a coil-built red clay centerpiece standing, in this case, about a yard tall and covered with layer-on-layer of ornamental fragments that overwhelm a viewer’s ability to reduce them to simple designs. Pruncks are the invention of Adero Willard, a mid-career ceramics guru with a resumé of civil rights activities who has crisscrossed the country teaching, demonstrating and advocating for equal participation regardless of an individual’s life circumstances or choices. Many of her activities promote community building, in which task she sees a role for ceramics and its ability to retain and stimulate memories. At the show’s opening, a visiting artist who had witnessed Willard at work described the full-bodied way she literally embraces such large works as she builds them, which sounds like her approach to life and ceramics on every level.

While Willard’s “Prunck” may rightly be centered in the front gallery, Rebekah Bogard, who organized Rebel Girl, chose to tuck her aquatic reverie into a remote corner, where the fable she creates appears much as her fantasy creatures emerge from the wooden floor that becomes pond water for the willing viewer. Around this transposed bit of primal nature, the rest of Rebel Girl continues the parade of works that, like the members of a strong family, convey something they hold in common while taking nothing away from their individual identities. As promised, none of them runs away from identifying with a female perspective, and speaking as one who felt crushed by the recent national repudiation of that point of view, we should all be grateful that the arts continue to offer a refuge and opportunities to celebrate this engagingly positive view of life.

Rebekah Bogard

Rebel Girl: You are the Queen of My World, Finch Lane Gallery, Salt Lake City, through April 11.

All images courtesy of the author.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.