“I begin each work by looking at my model for an extended period of time while drawing a portion of their body always from a point of view that creates an interesting shape,” Storer says. “As a sculptor I'm drawing an object or form on a field, my paper. Mainly I just want the shape I draw to fit on the page. When it doesn't I've got to tape on more paper. Since I know I'm drawing what will become a 3D sculpture the shape is the most important thing. I'm a sculptor and form matters most.”

As Storer moves from her initial drawings to create her sculptures, she must transcend the two-dimensional narrative plane of her subject. But that is easily done. What is the challenge for Storer is to make that transition while retaining all of those qualities that are encouraged in a two-dimensional subject to grant personality, character, uniqueness, and that have traditionally been found wanting in the objecthood of sculpture without a narrative or even a non-narrative structural support for meaning and responsiveness. In short, the benefits, or universal laws, of subjectivity must NOT be transcended in the process of going from two to three dimensions. How she does this in literal terms and not emphatically is through a methodology that might have been arrived at decisively but has the organic feel of a natural, fluent genesis and maturation by the artist. 

To create an initial rendering articulated in exactitude, Storer employs the drafting system of measurements of thirds she has long utilized to create a harmonious, naturally-rendered figure. She relies heavily on the fundamental principle that the figure can, in all of its components, be broken down, or built up, by three points. Storer always starts with the same three on the face, from which any other three can be built upon and thus the body is successfully constructed. And this is only the beginning to the realization. 

“Working in clay I add volume to this drawing,” she says. “I make what was once an illusion (a drawing) real because it now exists in three dimensions.  So working in high relief is perfect for me. Akio Takamori suggested I do so 3 years ago and I'm forever grateful to him.  And I chose this very foreshortened point of view because the entire triangular shape was interesting to me.”

Storer has carved her own niche as a sculptor and it is a very humanist one.  This humanism reveals her sitter’s maximum personality. As an ensemble, her works are a parade of the fascinating, made so through very unexpected compositional choices, most often made so through what appears to be the exaggerated or the maximized. But appearances can be deceiving, and the final structure, built upon the matrix of exacting and natural human lines created of thirds, with a uniquely chosen perspective, is constructed in ceramic form along those lines together with the use of proper perspective without any manipulation of exaggeration or maximization. Only the singularity of the “interesting shape,” derived from the original nude study, makes any kind of departure from these natural processes and the ultimate chosen angle of representation is something chosen for Storer’s “best” interpretation of that “interesting shape.”

Unlike traditional sculpture, these measurements that are exacting do not make allowances for objective three-dimensionality seen from all perspectives, nor for the two-dimensional planes that allow only for a fixed frontal point of view.  These are unusually and awkwardly beautiful, the kind of figure to be intensely studied and still have more to offer so much is the essence of their irresistible and likable personalities, a materialization of the “interesting shape” and perspective of it. 

Storer’s work currently on exhibit at Salt Lake’s Gallery at Library Square is a definitive manifestation of this singular method that organically
results along the lines of natural principles to create the subjects
as such, and not the inverse. One may judge for themselves the
accuracy that supports each utterly distinctive vantage point of
special interest that can be any, from one that peers into the sitter
through an acutely foreshortening of the breast through the side of
the face, or up and close, examining the sitter starting from the nose
jutting out while at an angle.

All of the drama that is created by the traditional narrative or non-narrative based content, broken, once a two-dimensional representation becomes ruptured and the flat picture plane becomes object, in Storer’s case remains, and is retained as subjectivity for the works of the artist.  The process of the actual build commences from the base and from inside outward, delicately and with great finesse.  A “formal subjectivity,” a concept new in theory, is manifest according to natural laws and synergy of both two-dimensional precise accuracy of drawing and masterful expertise of skill in rendering perspectival accuracy in three-dimensional ceramics.   

“Now line and shape combine with volume and all the other elements visual and tactile art can provide to make that connection as poignant as possible between artist and model and you, the viewer,” Storer says of her work.

Many artists and viewers see and connect with the personably ineffable and ineluctable charming individualities of each of Storer’s creations. One sees not only with the artist but one sees through her and feels through her. What Storer finds interesting about each of her subjects reveals the kind of artist and human being Suzanne Storer is. This choice is the very raison d’être of her exceptional efforts and the toilsome labor devoted to each subject, revealing great fragility and care, is weighty testimony of a uniquely impassioned creative artistic vision and perspective.

Suzanne Storer's exhibit People, Crows and Ravens is at The Gallery at Library Square in Salt Lake City through January 3, 2014. In addition to her figurative sculptural work, the exhibit features what Storer says are the last of her works as a potter. You can view more of the artist's work at suzannestorer.com.

Exhibition Preview: Salt Lake City
Death Is What Happens To Everyone Else?
Marcee Blackerby at Ken Sanders Rare Books
by Geoff Wichert

How jaded, how knowing we can think ourselves—
without knowing much of anything at all.
—Zadie Smith

It’s often said that fans confuse the characters in movies with the personalities of the celebrities who play them. Something similar must happen with art and artists. Surely no one was surprised to learn that Picasso, bawdiest of artists, was a shameless womanizer, but how many of Thomas Kinkaid’s admirers were taken aback when the pious painter drank himself into an early grave? One local artist whose work appears, at least initially, completely contrary to her personality is Marcee Blackerby, the impishly playful, demonstrative and delightful woman who appears as a cowgirl in her husband Rick’s imagery, and in her own self-mythologizing as a Harley-riding Hippy Mama, yet whose objets-d’art positively revel in the macabre.

No chance to once again encounter Blackerby’s evocative and arresting art should be casually missed. It’s not that she rarely shows, or that her work is hard to find. Rather, in spite of the challenge of finding material for her talismans, which partake of collage, mixed-media, and objet trouvé—the big three techniques of watershed movements like Dada and Surrealism—without really belonging in any one of them, she manages to be so prolific, as well as eager to share the discoveries that so clearly delight her, that her exhibitions tend to overwhelm audiences. The viewer unravels a few compound objects, takes in a handful of more straightforward ones, and totters off like that Monty Python character who begs to be excused, moaning “My brain is full.”

No doubt assemblage is the right term for Blackerby’s art, though care must be taken not to confuse it with artworks whose makers merely insert found objects in among new materials. Their goal is nostalgia, a sentiment totally missing from authentic assemblage. Artworks by Ed Kienholtz or Marcee Blackerby don’t just include authentic, surviving cultural wreckage: they exist to reanimate and critique those who made and used those artefacts, were shaped by them in turn, and then passed on, leaving them behind. Like those dancing skeletons that entertained and disconcerted medieval audiences, Blackerby’s ultimate subject is mortality, and the role it should play in everyday consciousness. Less heavy-handed than the skeleton with the motto, “As I am now, so you will be”—in fact, a lot less heavy-handed, more captivating instead—her art employs a seemingly endless supply of worn and damaged goods to stand in for ourselves. Paused on the downward spiral from pristine manufacture to inevitable annihilation, they create a resonance in us: an empathetic sense that we, too, are still interesting, still have some potential.

There are no doubt those in her audience who will argue that we already think enough about our mortality. Consider the current rage for post-apocalyptic fables, for vampires and zombies. Yet a few moments reflection will show that, while the anxieties that underlie these narratives has much to do with our fear and knowledge of death’s certainty, in fact their purpose is to allay those feelings and weaken that knowledge. The ‘Undead’ that used to frighten us do so no longer. In fact, with their warm, sparkling skin and irresistible romantic virtues, they argue for the same immortality that religion promises, but in a dare-we-say more attractive version than the one that has the faithful spending eternity in church. And those stories of how the world almost ends? Isn’t their point that we, the audience, and the protagonists we identify with, all survive into the new millennium?  Zadie Smith writes: “The post-apocalyptic scenario—the future in which everyone’s a corpse (except you)—must  be, at this point, one of the most thoroughly imagined fictions of the age. » But that’s entertainment, diversion, distraction. Marcee Blackerby, like Smith herself, seeks something more genuine.

To a humanist, art is here to help, even if that help entails some medicinal discomfort. It’s impossible to live life aware, at every moment, that I must one day die. My own death is now, and will always be, inconceivable to me. An art that maneuvers me closer to the facts, only to disappear like the bogey man, or that frightens me like a jack-in-the-box, only to let me off the hook, that art takes my time and money under false pretenses. For an alternative, for an image that can be borne, and that, like a good joke, makes the truth both more present and more palatable, I recommend those courageous artists who see the future not in some imaginary departure, but reliably predicted by past and present reality.  

An exhibit of new works by Salt Lake artist Marcee Blackerby opens at Ken Sanders Rare Books in Salt Lake City on December 6, 6- 9 pm. Various musical guests will be accompanying the opening, including Duncan Phillips as well as Marcee’s husband, Ric Blackerby. This event is free and open to the public.