Welcome to our Digest series from which we share our favorite happenings in exhibitions, design, and architecture, all served in small, yet filling bites. We’ve gathered our picks for the top 5 recent exhibitions. Enjoy!
1. Kimsooja | Hands On Participatory Installation, Archive of Mind
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massechussets
Through January 19, 2020
The exhibition comprises a huge oval table and several large slabs of clay. You’ll be asked to break off a chunk, take a seat on a low stool, roll your clay into a ball, and roll the ball into the middle of the table, where it will join hundreds of others, in various sizes and shades of brown and gray, made by previous visitors.
It’s a powerful demonstration of how discrete forms, like raindrops, brush strokes or human beings, can combine into a larger whole without giving up their individuality. As you’ll find if you wander into the project’s North American premiere at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., this summer, it’s also an ingenious way to trick thousands of museumgoers into meditating.
Text From HyperAllergic
Learn More about Kimsooja here
Visit the Museum site here
2. Simone Fattal | The Politics of Archeology and Excavation
Long Island City, New York
March 31–September 2, 2019
MoMA PS1 presents the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of the work of Simone Fattal (Lebanese and American, b. 1942) Simone Fattal: Works and Days explores the impact of displacement, as well as the politics of archeology and excavation, as these themes resonate across the artist’s multifaceted practice.
Never far from the earth, her works emerge as an unfinished project of telling the stories of ancient history with figures taken from central references such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Dhat al-Himma, and others. Both timeless and specific, her work straddles the contemporary, the archaic, and the mythic. Nearly 200 sculptural works made of ceramic, stoneware, terracotta, bronze, and porcelain are displayed on architectural plinth structures that move through different themes within her oeuvre.
Roberta Smith writes of Fattal the New York Times:
Simone Fattal seems to make small ceramic sculptures the way some artists dash off fast, skillful sketches. There’s a sense of intoxicating speed and wry pleasure in their loose, sometimes clumsy forms and usually bright uneven surfaces. Like the best drawn sketches, these works also have an uncanny accuracy in their approximations of the real world.
Text from MoMA PS1
See the MoMA PS1 website here
See Simone Fattal’s artist website here
3. Christopher Staley | Locating Selfhood through Creativity
The Jane Hartsook Gallery, New York, New York
August 30-September 27, 2019
The Jane Hartsook Gallery presented new work by Christopher Staley. In the artist’s first solo exhibition in 10 years, Staley uses introspection to locate creativity and selfhood within his artistic process. Like the Process Artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s, he began to reevaluate where “art” occurred in his making process. Was it the finished object or the steps along the way? By analyzing his work as metaphor and interrogating his creative process, Staley leads by example and encourages other artists to do the same, raising the question: Are the objects in this exhibition the art, or is the introspection Staley sparks in others his true art?
Text from the Greenwich House
Visit the gallery website here
See Chris Staley’s artist website here
4. Akio Niisato | Exhibition Pieces about Light, Dark and Inner Volumes
Oxford Ceramics Gallery, Oxford, UK
June 29 – AUGUST 9, 2019
Born in Chiba in 1977, Akio Niisato is one of Japan’s leading porcelain potters. His work is influenced by classical Chinese and Japanese work, but it also has very modern northern European qualities of simplicity and concision, with his translucent, thinly walled cylinder and bowl forms pierced to make luminous lattices and patterns of light. Slight eclipses and gently dented rims often add to the quiet movement of these vessels, with their skilfully drilled perforations creating delicate surface rhythms and energies. Akio Niisato studied at Tajimi City Ceramics Design Centre, and has gone on to exhibit internationally. His work is exlusive in the UK at the Oxford Ceramics Gallery.
Text courtesy of the gallery
Learn more about Akio in this video
Visit the Oxford Ceramic Gallery website here
5. Peter Voulkos | Exhibition of Bronzes
Burning in Water, New York, New York
June 26-September 28, 2019
Voulkos had begun experimenting with lost-wax casting techniques as early as the 1960s. In 1986 he met the Italian-born Piero Mussi. Mussi was skilled in advanced lost-wax techniques. Thus began a collaboration that continued until the artist’s death in 2002.One product of this collaboration was a series of bronze sculptures based on a number of Voulkos’ key works in ceramics, including select examples of his “stack,” “ice bucket” and “plate” forms. A selection of these works constitute the core of the current exhibition Peter Voulkos: Stacks (1969 – 2001) at Burning in Water. Not merely copies of Voulkos’ ceramic works, these pieces are singular amalgamations of Voulkos’ skill and artistic sensibilities in both media. As Voulkos states:
There’s a lot of difference between clay and a five-hundred-pound casting. [But] my ideas, you know, still come from feeding back on the clay when I first touched it, and everything that happened between then and now.
Text courtesy of the gallery
Read more at Burning in Water
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