{"id":90897,"date":"2025-03-04T05:50:45","date_gmt":"2025-03-04T12:50:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=90897"},"modified":"2025-03-30T10:27:12","modified_gmt":"2025-03-30T17:27:12","slug":"earth-in-flux-the-power-and-permanence-of-clay-at-wsus-shaw-gallery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/earth-in-flux-the-power-and-permanence-of-clay-at-wsus-shaw-gallery\/","title":{"rendered":"Earth in Flux: The Power and Permanence of Clay at WSU’s Shaw Gallery"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Gallery

Installation view of “Permanence of Earth” at the Shaw Gallery on the campus of Weber State University. Image by Geoff Wichert.<\/p><\/div>\n

Under the right circumstances, the entrance to an exhibition can be a portal to another reality. With good art, though, that strange land will soon reveal itself to be the one the audience sought briefly to escape, only transformed.<\/h4>\n

Eugene Ofori Agyei, one of ten ceramic sculptors being presented by the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts in Permanence of Earth, <\/i>at the Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery at Weber State, has captured that experience in \u201cComplex Journey 1.\u201d Here, an enormous flock of small creatures, each perhaps the size of a child\u2019s fist, seems to descend the wall by the gallery\u2019s grand doors and, having reached the floor, spreads out as if to merge with the new arrivals in what will become at least a shared tour, and perhaps even a new awareness. \u201cComplex\u201d may refer to the many forces that uproot us today, some in search of pleasure or knowledge, but too many concerned with survival: the hunt for a safe place, or the search for a new identity, or a place that could foster one. Thus the overarching theme of the many objects within is announced here, at the start.<\/h4>\n

The ten artists have each contributed between one and six sculptures, for a total of 34. Each contribution constitutes a body of similar, indeed closely-related works with a theme and influences included in a statement that can be found near the entrance.<\/h4>\n
\"Ceramic

Installation view of Eugene Ofori Agyei’s “Complex Journey I.” Image by Geoff Wichert.<\/p><\/div>\n

Lydia C. Thompson calls each of her sizable, yet discernibly ramshackle constructions an abode: two \u201cHollow Abodes,\u201d a \u201cWaterfall Abode,\u201d and \u201cBreathe: a White Abode.\u201d They have in common the invocation of a board-built structure with a loose, fancifully elaborate plan. They\u2019re as rough within as they are without, and she means them to engage barely conscious memories in the minds of their builders, but viewers will decide for themselves whether they give away their real origins or those recollected from stories, fables, myths or imagination. Thompson particularly considers the way nature edits or customizes the individual life\u2014the \u201cthree moves is as good as a fire\u201d ethos\u2014but as a cultural rather than a local, transitory fact.<\/h4>\n

Natalia Arbelaez does one of the many things that can be done in Spanish but not in English. In her standing figure, \u201cLa Creadora,\u201d she presents the Creator as female. To be sure, English has its \u201cgoddess,\u201d but that has more to do with desire than the entity who made everything. The stories Arbelaez illustrates here are about Isabella, the triumphant first queen of Spain, and her daughter, Juana, who was called Mad but became Spain\u2019s second queen. What these two Europeans have to do with a Colombian artist should not require too much thought: Isabella\u2019s sponsorship of Columbus set in motion events that leave Arbalaez not only a person of mixed history (there being no such thing as \u201crace\u201d) but an American of damaged status: citizen of a country whose legitimacy is dismissed by a powerfully venal nation to the North. One conflict she has resolved is to use terra cotta, the rich red clay in these figures and a mainstay of Colombian crafts that in the past was routinely disguised behind alien techniques like Majolica glaze.<\/h4>\n
\"Expressive

Natalia Arbelaez, “Juana La Loca.” Image by Geoff Wichert.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Mixed-media

Jessica L. Sanders, “Tiny Square Shape No. 5.” Image by Shawn Rossiter.<\/p><\/div>\n

Clay may be the most malleable medium in art. Not only that, it can simultaneously show the marks and pressures of the artist\u2019s own hand: her will in action. Once fired, it\u2019s permanent, as this show\u2019s title foregrounds. It\u2019s also a common people\u2019s material, and symbolizes their permanence on the land. Lest it be taken for a sign that everything has a place and belongs in it, however, consider Jessica L. Sanders, whose long hours of forming and elaborately decorating clay finally produces the last thing anyone expects: fabrics. Her interest is personal, rather than political\u2014though of course the personal eventually becomes political. But in Sanders\u2019 case, there are philosophical questions she seeks to answer, such as how static, permanent, vitrified material becomes fluid, active, and involved. Setting aside Scissors, how does the Rock become Paper? While she denies seeing these as quilts, she feels a continuity through time with everyone who works with textiles.<\/h4>\n

Some sculptors divide their ranks between those who work on the wall and others whose work stands on the floor or pedestal. The formers\u2019 efforts are generally viewed from the front, the others can be seen from all sides. While the artists in Permanence of Earth<\/i> don\u2019t entirely support this thesis, two of the more prolific include one of each. Courtney Mattison\u2019s \u201cSurface Tension\u201d series includes striking and colorful bas reliefs, each of which is both unconventionally large and made to seem even larger by the representations that cover them: tiny subjects that she has magnified many times over until they seem to leap off the wall. In fact, they\u2019re examples of marine life, particularly organisms that live on reefs and turn them into stunning gardens. They seem familiar and outsized probably because we\u2019ve seen them in aquariums, videos, and countless photographs, though there will be the fortunate few who have seen the survivors on the remaining reefs. Sadly, Mattison is celebrating what she knows to be the victims of global warming, which has bleached and killed many miles of the ocean\u2019s spectacular environments. She emphasizes that calcium carbonate, one of the components of potter\u2019s glazes, is also used by reef-building organisms to build the skeletons that support so much vividly colorful life. It may well be that one day such clay copies will be all that\u2019s left to see.<\/h4>\n
\"A

Courtney Mattison, “Surface Tension 13”<\/p><\/div>\n

Standing on pedestals before these marine visions, viewers will find half a dozen of Linda Nguyen Lopez\u2019s abstractions, each identified as a variety of \u201cDust Furry.\u201d These are but one example of the rich lives she asserts our inanimate possessions have while in our homes and workplaces. The stories Lopez tells herself, and others through her art, are apparently filled with anecdotes and humorous examples through which the \u201cDust Furry\u201d explains how the things we expect to wait passively where we put them somehow get into adventures and troubles we can only imagine.<\/h4>\n

One of the glories of clay is the astonishing verisimilitude it\u2019s capable of, which can be every bit as effective in small objects meant to sit on shelves or be held in the hand. Erin Furimsky fashions her clay into hand-and-eye satisfying, rounded forms that she experimentally covers with fragments of familiar-seeming decoration, which she meticulously inscribes onto their swelling surfaces and then paints. Intriguing, organic as though grown, surreal at times, they are the kind of thing that when seen invite touch, then can be returned to the shelf to await the next encounter.<\/h4>\n

In Matt Mitros\u2019s \u201cMug Compositions,\u201d hand-built parts are \u201cpressed\u201d into service with ones that are extruded, 3-D printed, or otherwise mechanically made. Functional parts like the mugs work together with purely ornamental elements nearby. Non-ceramics such as artificial grass are worked in to provide yet more contrast: divergences that extend to their goals, Does this technique originate in the pursuit of survival, or mere efficiency? He stresses the differences, but his aesthetic goal, and the challenge he sets for himself, is to try to unify the objects that result: a task in which he succeeds subliminally.<\/h4>\n
\"A

Installation view of “Permanence of Earth” with works (from left) by Eugene Ofori Agyei, Matt Mitro, Salvador Jim\u00e9nez-Florez, Erin Furimsky, Linda Nguyen Lopez, Erin Furimsky and Lydia Thompson. Image by Geoff Wichert.<\/p><\/div>\n

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