Review: Ceramics as a performance art: Pomona museum puts clay in motion on screen
Ceramics and video may make strange bedfellows, but "Recorded Matter: Ceramics in Motion" at the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona doesn't argue for any deep affinity between the two media, only a practical partnership.
Clay is primary to each of the 12 artists in this engaging AMOCA show, and video is largely a tool to chronicle the performative aspect of their work or to document the process of its creation.
In "Ghetto Is Resourceful," Roberto Lugo builds a potter's wheel from castoffs in an empty lot — hubcap, rope, an empty can. Using this humble, homespun wheel to create things of beauty is like a political act, an affirmation of identity and community.
In "My Wall," Eva Vogelsang's three-minute stop-motion video, coils of clay seem to stack themselves, building a cylindrical shell around the artist, an enclosure both protective and isolating.
Clay serves widely as a metaphor for malleable potential, raw material ready to be shaped. Broken ceramics, too, suggest something broader than themselves, a generalized shattering of wholeness: What was made has been un-made, and cannot be re-made. A few artists here exploit the dramatic finality of ceramic objects crashing to the ground, even when the context is light and amusing, as when clay stands in for a material far more durable. Man Yau shoots skateboarders on porcelain decks that don't survive their jumps, and Jo Kamm turns juggling routines into "Dangerous Games" by making the balls and bowling pins of fired clay.
SIGN UP for the free Essential Arts & Culture newsletter »
Garth Johnson of Arizona State University's Ceramics Research Center organized the exhibition, which would benefit from brief biographical introductions of the artists and notes to frame works. Cheyenne Chapman Rudolph's is one work that needs no explanation. She pairs her "CenterPeas" sculpture with a hilariously subversive infomercial detailing the purpose and merits of her new method for eating peas without spilling and making a "pea-mess." Rudolph channels Lucy Ricardo ("Do you panic at pea parties?") and assorted television hawkers, spiking her sales pitch with self-help rhetoric and sexual innuendo. Her sculpture and accompanying video glisten with intelligence and humor.
At the poetic heart of the show is Jason Lee Starin's "This Amorphous Moment," an eight-minute fugue of motion. A pair of hands, barely emerging from darkness, kneads, grips, squeezes and molds wet clay. The footage, stripped-down and sensuous, plays like a continuous, wordless manifesto affirming the elemental power of earthen matter worked by human hands.
Also represented in the show are Thomas Schmidt, Jeffrey Miller, Jonah Amadeus, Sam Brennan, Forrest Sincoff Gard and Ben Harle.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
‘Recorded Matter: Ceramics in Motion’
Where: American Museum of Ceramic Art, 399 N. Garey Ave., Pomona
When: Through Feb. 26; closed Mondays.
Information (909) 865-3146, www.amoca.org
Follow The Times’ arts team @culturemonster.
ALSO
Icelandic magic: One U.S. couple's excursions, on view at Photo L.A.
Bouchardon's extraordinary drawings changed the way sculpture looked
The biggest entertainment stories
Get our big stories about Hollywood, film, television, music, arts, culture and more right in your inbox as soon as they publish.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
