Tag Archives: sculpture

Ry Rocklen’s Cast Porcelain Objects

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Oreo Olympia, porcelain, 2009-14

The University of Georgia is hosting an exhibition of L.A.-based sculptor Ry Rocklen‘s work now through October 8. On view, among furniture made of trophies and works on paper, were several pieces of the artist’s clothing. A pair of socks. A hoodie. And several folded shirts.

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Installation view

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New Orleans Puff, porcelain, 2014

Rocklen uses his own clothing for molds into which he presses porcelain, and the objects become transformed by the hard material into something that wavers between a memory and an essence. In this fixed state, delicate details such as subtle creases remind all the more strongly of an object’s past, worn artifacts of lived life. They somehow become imbued with personality, intimate and fallible, ironically through a process which fixes them in permanence.

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Toucan Sam, porcelain, 2014

But I don’t mean to make these works sound overly poetic. Rather than magic in the moonlight, Rocklen chooses unromantic objects, like pizza and crushed cans, and even his personal clothes were functional and unremarkable. And while the alchemy of porcelain is transformative, its unglazed state and off-white color fends off associations of preciousness. Titles like that of the work above, Toucan Sam–punning on the two cans it is composed of, likewise keep you in the earthly rather than ethereal realm that white might otherwise suggest.

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Mauve American, porcelain, 2010-14

As the original clothes are lost in the casting process, the cast porcelain objects become markers of absence, on one hand recalling what the object was, like a memory. On the other hand, they present the essence of a form, stripping it of incidentals like color, even while severing the object from its original function. All of which serve to make the common and ordinary curious and appealing, and suggests a watchful attachment to the present, which so often slips by unnoticed.

A Redifined Existence at J. Cacciola Gallery

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The post about this show, which closed July 26, has been sitting in my drafts folder, but for lack of time rather than lack of things to say. The works of China Marks, Rick Newton, and Sally Curcio, interesting in their own right, were placed in thoughtful, playful dialogue with each other in the show A Redefined Existence at the J. Cacciola Gallery in Chelsea.

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Rick Newton’s clean-lined paintings register as normal at first, only to be belied with a touch of the surreal. The realistic rendering and precision of his painting style lends a cold edge to the combination of rationality represented by technological advanced vehicles and weapons and the irrationality of the blank background and details like the reaching claw in the painting above.

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Sally Curcio creates miniature worlds in the series on view. Her clean edges come from the re-purposing of plastic products to create cheerful, sweet worlds encased in glass bubbles. No less fantastical, and perhaps more accessible and inviting to the touch, are the sewn panels by China Marks. Marks creates scenes with characters and words that just stop just short of narrative.

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Overlaid with embroidery and different fabrics, the fabric panels recall the set up of cartoon panels but also the history of the craft of sewing and embroidery samplers. I read many of them as having a dark, slightly uneasy quality, like in the dialogue below. But open-ended as they are, it up to the viewer whether such statements are unsettling or funny.

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