It's hardly news that ceramics are more than teapots. Why, just last year the Jackpot! show at the Contemporary Arts Collective took that very theme to heart, presenting fanciful teapots as a measure of just how far clay had strayed from the utilitarian vessel. And then UNLV's Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery offered Not Teapots, a survey of contemporary ceramics laced with pop references and sometimes jejune irony.
All Fired Up: A Contemporary Ceramics Experience at the Reed Whipple Cultural Center Gallery through March 21, also seems to adopt as its project the elucidation of the no-teapots point, but it takes us a little further back into the question than the previous two shows, back to when the idea was closer to novel. In fact, two of the artists are professors emeriti, although neither necessarily was present at the birth of nonfunctional art ceramics.
Susanne Stephanson, at East Michigan University, hearkens back to the heady days of abstract expressionism with a large, round platter. It is precisely formed but vigorously modeled, with the ceramist's equivalent of thick impasto — glazed ridges that look like brush strokes. The untitled piece might not be abstract at all; it seems to beg the viewer to witness a tsunami bearing down on a coastal house.
Betty Woodman, longtime professor at the University of Colorado, contributes a "Grasshopper Napkin Holder," comprising banded, wavy ribbons of clay, folded to form the namesake utensil—though at too great a size to be useful. It is glazed in a bright and sprightly manner.
Other pieces have a more serious, almost ritualistic air to them, like Christine Federighi's "Bird Flight," a tall, black, totem-like staff adorned with fully formed birds and stylized house shapes. The "face" of the totem is covered with a slab representing a painted landscape. Or there is Deborah Masuoka's massive earthenware constructions, outsized masks of a "Bird Head" and "Rabbit Head," mysterious and lovely sculptures with richly worked surfaces and subtle glazing.
Xavier Toubes' large, stylized head seems to bear ceremonial significance, too, although it also points to traditional "face jugs" made in the Southeast. The heavy, worked surface is layered in matte glazes that shift from blue to brown to white across the primitive face, whose left ear is a foot imprint. Or maybe a mobile phone.
Perhaps best known among the group is Jun Kaneko, whose two sculptures titled "Dango" seem like a type of marker on the landscape, mileposts of the mind. One is like a dolmen or tablet, although it tapers downward, glazed cream with a dense, Pollock-like layering of black, calligraphic marks. Precise strips of pale, translucent color dot the surface. The other is more pillow-like, with a pale under-glaze of pink and blue, layered over with dark-brown lines and dots.
At the other, non-ritual end of the spectrum stand four pairs of wall-mounted founts by Tsehai Johnson. Each consists of an upper spout and a lower dish, like a holy water arrangement in a church vestibule. Johnson has aped baroque styles in airy glazes of pink and blue and yellow, with gold or silver accents, as if he were at work at Limoges or Meissen. Problem is, they're not as intricately formed or deftly decorated as their antecedents, and so they come off as merely ironic references.
The show was organized by Mark Masuoka, once director of the defunct Nevada Institute of Contemporary Art here, and now director of the Bemis Center in Omaha. It's a limited, but still tasteful and engaging examination of what clay can yield in the right hands: something close to the primal, to the dirt under our feet and fingernails.
Chuck Twardy has written about art and architecture for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.