Notes on the Ruby Green Ceramics Show

Ruby Green’s current exhibit is a group show of ceramic sculpture selected by Rob McClurg and Dona Berotti. They did a similar show there a couple of years ago with artists working in glass, and there were several things where that stuck with me, especially Becky Wehmer’s application of baking soda to the hot surface of the glass which after it has cooled eats away at the glass, causing it to decay over time. It gives the glass surface a much more organic texture, and the decay process is interesting to contemplate because glass is fundamentally a very stable material. I’m familiar with some researchers at Catholic University in DC who have developed methods to encase nasty chemical waste products in glass because it is so stable and impermeable. Based on stuff like that last time, I was looking forward to what they would come up with in clay, which is Rob McClurg’s primary medium anyway. (BTW, this show closes on Nov. 24.)

First off, all of the piece here were sculptural, none were based on vessels, and that’s disappointing to me. I’m really attracted to ceramics that work with the traditional forms as well as traditional materials and play through and with those forms somehow. Nothing wrong with using the medium for sculpture, I’m just into different bits of business with vessels.

That being said, there were, not surprisingly, several things of interest in this show. Let me start with one of Delia Seigenthaler’s pieces, called “Fuhn.” It is an exploded human body, a Buddha head capping it, dismembered arms and legs placed in position like it was being reconstructed from fragments, and in place of the torso, the forms of organs—lungs, liver, intestine, and kidneys I think, in artificial colors. I liked this as a take on eastern medicine, which dwells on spiritual dimensions of body systems at the same time being very concrete about components of the body. There is something earthy about these particular organs—kidneys and liver which process and clean up digestion of what a creature ingest, and the lungs with its mass of bronchia and alveoli to process air. The organs in the sculpture are bright and colorful, an oblique reference to chakra systems or some other method of classifying and characterizing parts of the body. While the colors were cheerful, there is something startling about being confronted by these specific organs that conveys the sense of a human being endowed with beauty but not detached from the practical realities of organic functions. It is a being that is spiritual and extremely physical, but not without a conflict between these two. They are mutual characteristics in this image.

The show includes two of Seigenthaler’s doll-sculptures, and I’m not crazy about those. The subtly (or maybe it’s not subtle) sexualized features give the pieces their problem statement, but I’m not that engaged by them as images/objects. “Fuhn” registered more for me, maybe because it connected with some ideas that already hold interest for me. The more overt spiritual dimensions of it may give me a better entry for the other pieces.

One thread in the show was gross stuff depicted in clay. This thread jumped out in part because of placement of objects. Right inside the entrance were two but pieces by Roxanne Jackson, “Hyena,” which was a threatening, evil-looking canine crouching close to the ground, and a piece called “Self-Sabotage” which has a mashed up figure that was an image of mutilation of vivisection. Somehow this connected with a piece by Ken Rowe called “Bunny Tale” which shows a kid poking at the decaying corpse of a rabbit. There was also some cartoonish violence in John Donovan’s work, as well as bunnies. One shows this cartoon bunny with a hot pink hole going through its belly, a splat of hot pink on the wall behind; the bunny is awkwardly holding a revolver. But with John’s work you’ve gotten away from gross stuff to the colorful, happy patterns of cartoons, even if it involves a rabbit with its guts blasted clean out.

Bunnies are the theme of all of John’s work, including two Bunny Warriors which are Asian-style sculptures of stocky, spear-carrying warriors wearing armor but also each have a bunny sitting on their head, where you might expect to see a helmet or at least a predator’s head.

Ken Rowe’s bunny piece was placed next to a couple of Jason Briggs’ sculptures, which are composed of forms that are abstract but still disconcertingly biomorphic. Rowe’s pieces are very realistic in the manner of a traditional illustrator, but they bring back to mind a point I’ve made about Briggs before, which is that his work is also very realistic. The surfaces look like real skin and hair, some parts of the skin rough and dry, but other parts are moist and fleshy. He convincingly creates the trompe l’oeil impression of skin and flesh within compositions that have no connection to identifiable biological objects.

To my eye, the closest thing to vessels in this show was Rob McClurg’s assemblage “Did X Know Y Too.” It’s a whole mess of similar spermatozoa-shaped forms attached to a wall and piled up at its bottom. The sperm-forms could also be sea shells, and they all seem to have different variations of glazes and surface treatment. This piece shows the inventiveness of working with a single form and finding all the variations you can within certain parameters of color and pattern. It’s a key way potters indulge their inventiveness around the generation of vases or bowls. So in addition to the humor of this depiction of the sperm’s race to fertilize the egg, with failed entrants falling by the wayside, the piece also makes use of the creative sources inherent in ceramics as a medium and a practice distinct from sculpture.