Exhibition | “Hetero & Semiotic” Pairs Two Paths Growing Popular in Ceramic Art

Hetero & Semiotic (October-November, 2015), currently on view at Ann Linnemann Gallery in Denmark, is a two-artist show pairing sculptors Per Ahlmann and Colby Parsons. The artists each present a body of work highlighting two paths becoming more common in contemporary ceramic art – the integration of new media and Nagle-esque pop-abstraction.

Above Image: Colby Parson, Semiotic Series.

Per Ahlmann is a ceramic sculptor woking with an intimate focus on shape, surface, and color. His work juxtaposes sensual forms and industrial elements, all dripping with brightly-colored glossy glazes. Ahlmann’s surfaces and playful forms recall Ron Nagle’s sculptures, blown up in scale and leaning towards artifacts, rather than micro-environments. Read more about Ahlmann’s work in our coverage of his 2014 exhibition at Galleri KANT.

Colby Parsons, a sculptor and ceramics professor living in Denton, Texas, explores abstract and textural qualities of video projection on ceramic wall objects. Using his forms as a canvas for projection, Parsons gives form to light and motion to sculpture.

Parsons’ explains his Semiotic series, “This group of work features small vignettes or still lifes based on actual objects or groups of things I come across in my daily life — a box of lightbulbs, a drawer full of silverware, a cast iron skillet, etc.  The projected video is a collage of found and collected still and moving imagery showing either depictions of the rendered objects,  or things and phenomena connected to them by association. These are meant as explicit renderings of the way we understand physical reality — in particular the way any object we encounter is understood in reference to past experiences.”

See more projection sculpture by Parsons in this companion piece.

Love contemporary ceramic art? Tell us what you think of Hetero & Semiotic in the comments!