For a lighter and extra categorically summery Santa Barbara Museum of Artwork encounter than the delicate, enigmatic survey of James Citadel’s dusky spit and soot drawings, proceed to the smaller Emmons Gallery and bask within the colourful, sly-witted fare to be discovered within the exhibition WARES! Extraordinary Ceramics and the Atypical Dwelling. Right here, components of pop artwork’s fusion of excessive and low tradition and carbonated irreverence meet within the realm of latest/trendy ceramic artwork, a medium nonetheless deserving extra love within the fine-art world.
Highlights on this combine embrace each rising artists and such groundbreaking luminaries as Viola Frey, Robert Arneson, and Ojai’s personal beloved Beatrice Wooden (1893–1998). Wooden’s small, genially grotesque autobiographical collectible figurines, like wedding ceremony cake cameos, allude to her husband-by-convenience Steve Hoag and pal and confidant Helen Freeman, as a lopsided, lippy nude.
Arneson’s playful and decidedly pop-artful 1963 piece “Case of Bottles” counterbalances the truth of a single mass-produced soda bottle (7Up, the reality be instructed) with a motley crew of gruffly normal ceramic facsimiles. Artwork imitates market actuality, crudely, and trumps the business commodity topic.
Within the massive centerpiece of the exhibition, Frey’s wild and eccentric “Homage to Dubuffet” (1977–80), a larger-and-funnier-than-life coupling of a tall, fauvist-colored lady going through off with a mangled beast of the kind that “Artwork Brut” grasp Jean Dubuffet may need created. It’s an artwork historic in-joke, wherein magnificence meets beast and eras and attitudes do a wobbly dance.
Against this, Gifford Myers’s deceptively soft-spoken piece “Holding On/Holding Out” toys with notion of scale, for commentary’s sake. A tiny, all-American suburban house is seen dwarfed by looming monolithic black partitions, symbols of faceless city encroachment.
From the youthful set of ceramic artists, the choice contains two beforehand not proven on gallery partitions, Woody De Othello’s “beneath the floor adjustments happen that we can’t bear witness to,” and Seth Bogart’s “Cheeks.”
Bringing into the sector of effective artwork the on a regular basis — the “extraordinary house” facet of the exhibition title’s equation — is an goal for Stephanie Shih, whose life like renderings of things, edible and in any other case, from Asian-American grocery shops cope with ethnic and commodity-related themes, whereas additionally merely pleasing our sense of texture and design.
In his personal completely different approach, Bogart’s purposefully funky representations of elite perfumery vessels makes for a pleasant but subversive reversal scheme at hand, and at play. Talking of which, play of an enlightened type, is a normal MO on this present, finest loved with a fizzy thoughts/eye.
WARES! Extraordinary Ceramics and the Atypical Dwelling is on view at Santa Barbara Museum of Artwork via September 17. See sbma.internet.
