At PPAC through May 15, .matrix includes work by artists interested in “pushing the limits of the printed image and how it is created, used and disseminated.” This isn’t your grandmother’s printmaking. Much of it purposefully challenges our perception of the single matrix, or surface onto which one unique print is impressed.

Kasselskramer Publishing's wall of archival inkjet prints

Kesselskramer Publishing’s wall of archival inkjet prints were achieved using the same kind of digital printing that any of us can use to run off copies of our vacation photos.  Does the ability to make countless copies of the same print quickly and with very little effort cheapen the final product?  In what ways do these prints blur the line between printmaking and photography?  These are just the kind of questions .matrix hopes to provoke.

Many of the prints here are lovely to look at, but reading the labels is the key to really appreciating them.  As with the Kasselskramer prints, the techniques are unexpected.

Donald E. Camp's faces through the glass

Donald E. Camp’s larger-than-life images of heads were made with casein and earth pigment on Arches rag paper.  Matthew Brandt used his subjects’ own bodily fluids to texture and color his small character studies.

'Belen, 2006' - A print soaked in the subject's own sweat

Paul Swenbeck and Nick Lenker’s collaborative show at Bambi is a twisted fever dream, in clay.  Imagination and spontaneity drive these pieces, and the curator’s description reminds us that this approach to shaping clay, and the work that it produced here, is a big break from traditional ceramics.

Swenbeck and Lenker's 'Lucifer'

Libby and Roberta said it best last week: these two are “the boys of darkness.”  The gore-factor is simultaneously off-putting and intriguing.  These are the kind of pieces that make you take two steps forward, one step back in confusion, and then a step forward again for another look.  I was most drawn to the mythological references, as in Lucifer, above.  But symbolism aside, the oozing eyes were just plain great.

On the red eye

There was more clay to be had at Projects Gallery, where To Die For is on through May 1.  Like Swenbeck and Lenker, the artists showing here are putting a new spin on the medium.  Instead of breaking with the past though, they are riffing off of it.  Ceramics, like canopic jars in ancient Egypt, have long played a role in death rituals, and these sculptors use clay to deliver modern meditations on death.

Gregg Moore's 'The Miner's Canary Project (Carbon Cloud with Canary Pile)' at Projects

There is lots of dark humor, including in Gregg Moore’s canaries, and Janice Farley’s The Suicide Set (9 plates).  And some artists even deal with non-human, or avian, death.  David Furman bemoans The Death of Dessert & the Birth of McDonald’s in five pieces that morph from bowl of ice cream to Golden Arches franchise store.

Handmade graph paper, shattered glass on the floor at Rebekah Templeton.

Finally, a quick hop over to Rebekah Templeton on Girard Ave.  Sebastian Leclercq’s Supposedly fills the one-room gallery and covers the building’s exterior until April 24.  No splashy clay pieces here, just 132 sheets of white paper with simple wooden frames.  The sheets encircle the room, and moving from left to right, Leclercq added graphing lines one-by-one to achieve the final row of complete, hand-drawn graph paper.  On the gallery floor at the end of this paper trail: a pile of graph paper, frames shattered, as if the monotony and tension of drawing one line at a time, and watching one line added at a time, became too much to bare.

The Naomi Cleary I have uses a bunch of yellows and blues and greens, there is some grey, the patterning is definitely floral in nature. On my bowl the pattern on the outside is much different then the pattern on the inside, the bottom lip that my bowl rests on is also patterned, a fact that I find out when I turn the bowl over. The bottom has a matte finished, it is unglazed. If I wanted to I could eat ice cream out of my bowl. I find the object I hold in my hands at once simple and complex. I find it beautiful. I am so glad that I am allowed to hold it.

This is the reason I wanted to talk to Naomi, she makes great pots, and I think that’s really something.

You mean real art not pots

Annette Monnier: So I basically invited you here today to ask you why you make pots? I ask because you have a MFA and I think most people make a distinction between functional objects and fine art. . .

Naomi Cleary: You mean real art not pots.

AM: You said it so I didn’t have to, but yes.

NC: I guess a lot of times one thing just leads to another and you go to art school and you take certain classes and you end up liking the material.

For me I was in graduate school and I couldn’t take the jewelry elective because it was full so they put me in crappy ceramics which I did not want to take and I somehow just stayed there. I like the process of making things out of clay. I like working with the material. I’ve always liked domestic objects and the personal relationship we have to the things that we use everyday. The things that we keep close to our bodies.

I think food and eating and dishes and the body and family. . . it’s all wrapped up in there.

Another related fact is that I want to make three-dimensional objects because I want to put a pattern on them. I don’t like patterning flat surfaces, it doesn’t do the same thing for me. I like things that you can pick up and turn over and discover other parts of them by holding and turning. Often times with art objects you can’t do that. The object sits on a pedestal and hangs on the wall and there is really only one way of viewing that object.

Q: Where are objects worth more? A: On the wall.

AM: Not to drive this into the ground, but would you ultimately say that one art form is better then the other functional vs. non-functional?

NC: I think it depends on what you are talking about, but in terms of perceived value I think that anything that hangs on the wall is going to be worth more. You can make a plate or a coaster or you can make a tile that hangs on a wall and the tile that hangs on the wall is always going to be worth more money because that tile is creeping into this fine arts realm where objects are worth more.

AM: Isn’t that frustrating to you?

NC: Yeah. Yeah, it frustrates me. I think that I also have to say that I’m not entirely committed to only dishes though I have been making them for awhile now.

AM: Would you rather be making other objects?

NC: No.

Or yes. Doesn’t. . . sometimes it’s hard to switch gears but I could re-format my studio and just make forms and pattern them.

The amazing bonus

AM: It seems like the heart of your art is the pattern, I know you research patterning and grab source material from a variety of cultures to create your own motifs. It seems really personal. . . for instance you have a motif I’ve often seem on your pots tattooed on your arm.

The painted decoration on your pots is very aesthetically pleasing and it is as you say; it improves it that there’s an inside pattern and something on the bottom to discover when you turn over a cup or bowl. . . it’s just an amazing bonus that you can also use the object.

NC: Isn’t it crazy that it’s like a two for one deal but that means it’s worth less? Just pattern would probably be worth more.  It isn’t really even money it’s value. Scratch money, it’s just valued more highly.

It’s all really hard

AM: If I were you I think I’d be a little bitter and I guess I was wondering if you were. . .

NC: Bitter?

AM: Yeah. You make some wonderful art objects and I’m finding that even the words I’m using like “art objects” seem like they might be a little insulting. . . what you make is art, but for some reason there has to be this distinction.

NC: Is artful the same as art? You know, either way is really hard. Art artist, craft artist, functional artist. . . it’s all really hard.

Buying less shoes and making it work

AM: Do you feel like you’re a part of the “indy craft movement”?

NC: I think I’m using that because it’s there to use. I don’t think that my work fits into the general style of let’s say The Renegade Craft Fair. Even though my work is not very traditional ceramic pottery it’s very obviously being made by someone who’s formally trained and has knowledge of ceramic history. It just doesn’t fit.

If I made wood-grained cups with birds on them I would get into all the craft shows I’m sure and those would be great things to sell. . . I don’t really fit in that market and that actually makes me mad sometimes.

AM: Almost.

NC: Yeah. and a lot of times I really struggle with that because I don’t really fit into that market but I don’t really fit into the traditional pottery realm either. I hope I can sneak into both.

It just comes back to what I really want to do and why not spend my energy making the thing that I really want to make? It just comes down to figuring it out and maybe buying less shoes but making the work I want to make.

Naomi on Ceramics Arts Daily

Buy and see Naomi’s stuff:

The Clay Studio

Naomi on Etsy

Naomi’s website

If the art world was a High School and the students in it were the mediums in which an artist could work, video, sculpture in general, and installation would currently be vying for the title of coolest kid. Each medium fashionably dressed with a hint of outsider rebellion even though they are firmly aware they fit right in. Screen-printing is the highly amusing social butterfly who fits in with everyone. Painting might be like a head cheerleader or have some position on the football team, drawing/works on paper might be her slightly mousier best friend (adjust metaphor if she is a he) who sometimes looks longingly across the cafeteria at “the cool kids.”  Specific mediums such as glass, ceramics, comic books, and dance would all be various forms of “nerd” groups, soundly immersed in their individual dungeons and dragons type hobbies. Each of these groups have their own little economies and at times may be thoroughly unaware of the fact that the rest of the school has such a high opinion of themselves.

To understand why I think Dirt on Delight is so cool it is imperative that you continue thinking of the art world as a High School in which clay as a medium is an unloved and misunderstood outsider. If you do not keep this in mind you will still find an awesome and educational exhibition. (Libby, on this very blog, has taken great lengths to showcase some of the exhibition’s highlights, here.) You must understand that in my Art World High School, institutions like the ICA hang out with the cool kids and don’t usually walk over to the clay side of the cafeteria. Dirt on Delight is equivalent to Veronica Sawyer (Heathers) deciding to hang out with her old pal Betty Finn.

Following my metaphor, we find that our lives are often enriched by hanging out with “the nerds.”  Betty Finn was a much better friend then any of the Heathers; Lindsay Lohan became a monster when she hung out among the in-crowd in Mean Girls, Napoleon Dynamite. . . etc. Of course there are people who will applaud the ICA’s “generosity” in using it’s popular status to bring clay into the fold and then there are those who will claim that they only did it for a bet (She’s all That), and though they have come to love clay now, they have not loved clay as some have loved clay–in fact they even gave clay a make-over to fit their personal contemporary image of her, they could not love pots or cups. They could not love clay as a “nerd.”

In the words of Levar Burton, don’t take my word for it, some amazing reviews have been written on the subject:

Clay’s Big Day
The Art World Is in a Place That’s Very Familiar Ground in the Realm of Ceramics
By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer

Those diminished expectations seem to have infected potters, too. Judging by this show, the discipline that gave us ancient Greek amphorae, Renaissance majolica, the tea bowls of Japan and the constructivist coffee sets of Kasimir Malevich now seems content to treat clay as fun stuff to fiddle with. In art schools, the “serious” art students call their pot-throwing colleagues “mud bunnies.” “Dirt on Delight” shows its artists living up to the insult: Their work is mostly about dug-up mud, and what a craftsman’s hands can do to make it weird, wacky and, of course, dirtily delightful. Those notions have ruled ceramic art for such a time, they’ve become its most entrenched cliches — and like all cliches, they’ve lost whatever impact they once had.

Crucible of Creativity, Stoking Earth Into Art
By Roberta Smith
The New York Times

The show’s determination to integrate ceramics into the art mainstream is nothing new. But its refusal to do so simply by slipping some universally agreed-upon ceramic exceptions into a show of painting, sculpture and so forth is close to groundbreaking.

In short, I like Dirt on Delight. The exhibition has expanded the dialogue along the lines of fine art and craft and though we still have a long journey ahead of us it has paved the way for understanding between the various mediums of art. Someday our High School will be a better place. Go see it before it’s gone.

Juliana Cerqueira Leite’s show “UP DOWN IN OUT” at the Trolley Gallery in London is a welcome addition to the current   crop of artists who are measuring the world using themselves as the yardstick.  Whether it be  Marlene Dumas  spreading her arms to measure the length of her grave or Antti Laitinen digging tunnels or bucking watery currents with a made to measure island or Rebecca Warren tussling with material that is too heavy for her,  artists are physically wrestling with the weight of earthly and human  substance.

"UP", "DOWN", and all around.

In my youth on the East Coast USA we pondered digging a hole all the way to China. How far down does an artist have to dig to make a point?  Leite set up two solid blocks of clay  on wooden stands 210cm x 90cm and then proceeded to dig a tunnel  down into one and up into the other using only her naked body as a tool. She imposed on herself to take up the least amount of space possible. The film « Being John Malkovitch » immediately comes to mind. Someone has discovered a narrow slimy, (sewer?) tunnel that sucks a person  into Malkovitch’s body. They see with his eyes. Malkovitch finds out about this portal and enters it to be sucked down into himself.

Instruction manuel.

To me Leite’s forray into the clay , especially upwards, is nothing less than a trip into Uterus Bay and birth canals past, present and future. I can imagine the blocks of clay as statuesque and exuding maternity and fertility. Her trip within must have been dark, humide and oxygen deprived without the help of an umbilical cord. She doesn’t poke new eyes or nostrils into the matter like a god and accepts to be  blinded  by dark materials. For the voyage up these chtonian rivers that flows slow and thick no oars are required and you have to get in to get out. A seperate sculpture entitled “AROUND” completes the Diana Ross “Inside out , boy you turn me, upside down, and, all around . . .” flavor here. Leite combined “UP” and “Down”  to try and go in full circle but had to stop before the clay caved in. There is a strong seaside overtone here as these are the kind of digging we naturally do at the beach. Leite is not on vacation however and it is hard to imagine a human in these spaces.  These are  Houdini-esque enterprises.

"AROUND"

 The result of these excavations come  to us in the form of plaster casts. Ordinarily I find plaster a bit mortuary. Indeed here we see a kind of death mask of the action and we are forced outside of its result. I would have been much happier to climb in and have a look myself.  ”Down” is hung like a stalactite and recalls a vase while “UP” is a  stalagmite. Together they invoke Yeat’s widening gyre in « The Second Coming”  and how the winding down of one thing is always the winding up of something else.  Lodging her shoulders, feet and knees against the clay walls in “Down” was the only purchase she had during the two weeks of digging. These elements poke through the stalactite’s skin and we want to grab hold of her.  

"DOWN" detail.

 The stalagmite is smoother and easier as there was no lifting involved in the process. Her finger trails create the impression of hair. The foetal curl of “AROUND”  confirms the human posture of all this digging. 

"DOWN" detail.

 There are two photos flanking the casts which remind us that everything is turning. They depict Leite’s body in a spin, her blurred body orbiting like a cloud of electrons around its belly button nucleus ( What is the atomic number of Woman?). It feels solar and yet it casts no shadows. Clay has become skin. We know where the center of the world is, though. To there, and not to China, Leite has dug.

"TURNING"

 Leite continues to  create  and investigate dark zones of her own creation. In a series of large drawings constructed according to the theoretical paths of intersecting light we see dark zones where color is denied. These are spaces she creates with her body such as the  two triangles formed when hands go on hips. 

Hands on hips drawing.

Computer video at the origin of light drawings. Note the screen lines in green..

Despite all of the excavation this is a solid show. Leite and the clay are one  and her actions are guided by basic geometry and the full range of human and planetary action. Dig it.