Push Play - Adopt-A-Native

Push Play
Reinventing the Wheel
P
ushing boundaries, repackaging entertainment
icons and exploring gender identity and social
roles are just some of the threads that run
concurrently through the Bellevue Arts Museum
exhibition Push Play: The 2012 NCECA Invitational,
running from 19 January to 17 June, 2012. Dynamic
installations commanding various galleries share
space with smaller scale counterparts that manipulate the ceramics medium in fresh, edgy and unexpected ways.
Play, which is at the heart of this ambitious
undertaking, starts with childhood where essential life skills are learnt, as explained by co-curators
NCECA Exhibitions Director Linda Ganstrom and
BAM Director of Curatorial Affairs/Artistic Director
Stefano Catalani. Play may bring out the child in all
of us but, from the start, nonverbal communication,
social interaction, fantasy and imagination, as well
as discovery set the stage for a life well lived.
Out of 200 artists,
33 international artists
were selected to participate from a call for entries that generated 2000
works. The bar is set high so one can only guess at
the work that did not make the cut.
To celebrate the various works, it is best to recognise them through the similar concepts they represent. Take Anne Drew Potter’s The Captain’s Congress,
a searing look at peer pressure. Fourteen children
sculpted in unglazed stoneware are perched on
wooden crates joined in an intimate play circle that
fills most of the gallery. Apart and excluded from
the circle is a lone child seated with her back to the
others.
No dialogue needed here. Potter’s narrative is
told through the exaggerated body language and
grotesque facial expressions of her child gang. The
figures may be naked but the caricatured bodies
are anything but vulnerable. Innocence has been
replaced by mean-spirited jockeying for position and
for attention. It is not clear if there is a leader. What
is clear is that the group dynamic has seen one child
cast out and ostracised: A familiar scenario depicted
down to the unifying paper hats worn by all the
figures in the circle. It is a powerful commentary
on how children take their behavioural cues from
moments of group play.
What a Doll: the Human Object as Toy by Christina
West and Come Undone
by Beth Cavener Stichter
combine
body
and
movement similar to Potter’s work with the addition of a third element – reinterpreting familiar narratives. What a Doll is a montage of life size dolls
with slipcast limbs and cloth-stuffed torsos circling
around each other while bolted to the walls. The
notion of a doll as plaything is literally turned on its
head. The dance of bodies is accentuated by blank or
A Review by Judy Seckler
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anguished faces, dressed in clothing that is adult and
sophisticated with dot or paisley patterns and a hint
of sexual tension. These dolls have left the comfort
zone of simple childhood roleplaying and relationship building. West introduces nuances to her figures
that are as complex as they are unsettling.
Cavener Stichter turns up the volume on unsettling with Come Undone, her 25-foot installation of a
stoneware wolf ready to attack while a pink mixed
media cloud of mostly fibres explodes like vomit
from its lips. It is hard to miss. The cascade of pink
chunks is composed of ribbon, bows, artificial flowers, tulle and crocheted yarn, which brings levity to
the proceedings. The cunning and dangerous archetypal wolf that we know from folk tales is reimagined, introducing a duality not seen before between
the feminine and the masculine. The combination
of media might throw many off their straight and
narrow ceramics compass with its kitsch sensibility. For those who embrace Cavener Stichter’s novel
approach, it represents the boundless future of clay.
The future also relies on play to pave the way for
inventing new language. Beginning with Megumi
Naitoh, her 6/12/2009 earthenware screen-printed
frieze is a throwback to mosaic and tile murals, while
at the same time exploring imagery inspired by a 3D
virtual world. Images of domesticity and avatars
comingle in a world where it is possible to create an
alternate identity for play and fantasy purposes.
Facing page: Anne Drew Potter. The Captains Congress. 2011.
Stoneware, wood, acrylic and newsprint.
Above: Christina West. What a Doll: The Human Object as Toy.
2010. Slipcast ceramic and stuffed fabric. 49 x 12 x 8 in/ea.
Photo by Colin Conces.
Social interaction becomes a mind/keyboard
experience, where patches of white mosaic, creating
a flickering effect that references movies, videos and
the ephemeral nature of online interaction, interrupt
Naitoh’s images. Her work is a commentary on contemporary life: Play is available at our fingertips and
is effortlessly integrated in to real life.
Adrian Arleo’s Swan switches our attention from
daily life to the subconscious. Dreams are often places
to be playful and encounter the fantastic. A swan in
folklore and mythology was seen as a messenger and
associated with power and fertility. Arleo’s sculpture
transforms the swan into a seer. Its feathered surface
is covered with questioning eyes. It sits on an undulating platform glazed in shades of blue attached to
a similar organic pedestal glazed in shades of green.
The technical prowess of the sculpture speaks louder
than its psychological implications. On one level, the
swan is a recognisable icon but on another level, the
sculpture attaches new meanings to its subject.
Sam Scott reaches back to a recognisable ceramic
form, creating a series of six plates that exist as
contemporary fossils. He uses symbols of play and
games to capture the significance of play.
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Above: Beth Cavener Stichter. Come Undone. 2012. Stoneware,
mixed media with fibre elements created in collaboration with Lauren
Turk. Courtesy Claire Oliver Gallery, New York. Photo by Doug Yaple.
Below: Megumi Naitoh. 6/12/2009. 2009. Screen printed ceramic
earthenware. 30.75 x 20 x 2.25 in.
At first, the black and white plate titled Play/KT
appears to be a jumble of symbols and letters. Woven
into the surface of the plate are images of astronauts,
robots, cowboys, dominoes, dinosaurs, soldiers,
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Ceramics: Art and Perception No. 88 2012
knights in armour interspersed with random letters.
It is a short list of favourite toys plucked from childhood. They are the items that provide the catalysts
for imagination. The placement of the various icons is
energetic and conveys that play is a vital part of life.
With War Games, Scott ties iconic playthings to
contemporary life. At the centre of the plate is a TV/
game remote control. All the toys ricochet off and
around this symbol of what has now become play
central in the lives of many. The plate Push Play,
whose letters resemble children’s building blocks, is
a nod to another classic toy and puts a playful face
on the exhibition name, while revisiting the same
themes as War Games.
Skipping from Scott’s work to a sculpture by
Ian Thomas and Ryder Richards, Monument to a
Quarter Million Dreams uses clay in new ways to
illustrate how childhood fantasies translate into
physical objects. Whether the frame of reference is
the American space program or homage to sci-fi fantasy films such as Star Wars or Alien, the mysteries
of space travel are a springboard for play. Thomas
and Richards have used a raw clay glue mixture to
create a sculpture that totters back and forth between
being seen as a skeleton of an unknown aircraft and/
or a reminder of a fallen icon like Ozymandias where
dreams rise and fall from the poem of the same name
of Percy Bysshe Shelly.
Play can also be seen as transformational as
personified by the works of Rebekah Bogard and
Diego Romero. The links to reality become blurred
in Bogard’s large dreamscape Gravitational Pull.
Inspired by camp-outs sleeping under the stars, bulbous abstract trees frame a scene where rabbits of an
anthropomorphic bent recline on unfamiliar organic
pedestals. It is a dream version of the forest with
lush, erotic flowers showing their blooms and stars
hanging above. Bogard turns her attention to twilight, in her estimation, the magical time of the day
when things are about to change. The transformation
leaves room for play, exploration and discovery.
Working on a more intimate scale, Romero
uses the tradition of Native American pottery as
a jumping off point in Wonder Woman. Play and
playfulness are both at work in Romero’s technically taut bowls. He melds the stylistic imagery
of comic books with Pueblo pottery to create a
hybrid style that addresses contemporary issues.
Comic book heroes afford a chance for adventure
and room for play.
Top left and below: Sam Scott. Top left: Push Play.
Below: War Games. 2011. Kai Porcelain.
Cone 12 gas firing. 13 x 13 x 1.5 in.
Above: Diego Romero. Wonder Woman. 2011.
Ceramic and gold lustre.
Courtesy of Robert Nichols Gallery.
For all the many sculptures in the exhibition that
could not be included on these pages, it can be said
that they possess depth and power in a limitless
variety of styles and techniques. Also play, it has
been shown, is not the unique domain of the young.
It is the spark that is available to all who are able to
harness it.
Judy Seckler is a Los Angeles-based magazine writer, specialising
in art, design and architecture. (www.judyseckler.com) (www.
twitter/judyseckler). Her previous two reviews for Ceramics: Art
and Perception were Making Fun: The 67th Scripps College Ceramic
Annual and Brad Miller: Primordial Algorithms (Issue 87/2012).
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