{"id":91091,"date":"2025-03-11T13:34:28","date_gmt":"2025-03-11T20:34:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=91091"},"modified":"2025-03-30T10:27:19","modified_gmt":"2025-03-30T17:27:19","slug":"finch-lanes-rebel-girl-is-empowerment-in-clay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/finch-lanes-rebel-girl-is-empowerment-in-clay\/","title":{"rendered":"Finch Lane’s “Rebel Girl” is Empowerment in Clay"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Yolanda Spears, \u201cPower to the Pu$$y”<\/p><\/div>\n

There\u2019s a moment in Gandhi<\/i> where an Englishman asks the film\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/i>, an exhibition that\u2019s taken over the Finch Lane Gallery this month.<\/h4>\n

The universe from which Rebel Girl<\/i> 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 <\/i>was envisioned as a \u201cchain reaction of inspiration,\u201d 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.<\/h4>\n

The success of this approach can be seen in the range of results. Where the chosen artists might have nominated others like themselves\u2014and we\u2019re not told which of them recommended which\u2014no two artists\u2019 works resemble each other the way, for example, glass galleries in the Northwest once filled with Chihuly knockoffs. In Io Palmer\u2019s \u201cMeander\u201d\u2014a name equally apt for wandering paths or intricate ornamental patterns\u2014 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\u201d 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.<\/h4>\n
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Io Palmer, \u201cMeander\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

Meanwhile, other glimpses of life lived beyond the glare of commercial media come from Joy Okokon\u2019s “Koroba ati Afro Comb\u201d and “Koju Soko ati Afro Comb,\u201d each of which enlarges on an indigenous cultural tradition. That \u201ckoroba\u201d 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.<\/h4>\n

Two of the more elaborate projects here essentially bookend Rebel Girl.<\/i> Coming from more traditional sources\u2014literally so, given her elaborate upcycling of found ceramic elements\u2014Lydia Thompson\u2019s three scenes of birds \u201cFlocking\u201d in birdbath-like settings collectively express three existential moods: \u201cExile,\u201d \u201cCompulsion,\u201d and \u201cResilient.\u201d 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 \u201cPower to the Pu$$y\u201d 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\u2019 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.<\/h4>\n
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Lydia Thompson, “Flocking: Exile”<\/p><\/div>\n

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