Achieving and Undermining Too Many Dinner Parties
Lewis & Clark College
Curated/Organized by Malcolm Hecht
"I was beginning to question the way people folded like soft paper shapes, into one another. Insignificant pulpy globes, conglomerated fibers. Like a napkin nervously rubbed between a thumb and index finger, tiny bits of paper rolled into cylinders on perspiring palms––pieces of a discarded whole now slick and somewhat symmetrical. How these shapes became objects that people would eventually pass through: the steam emitting from a boiling kettle,
the slight curve in the handle of a toothbrush, the unnoticed differences in patterned bathroom tiles. And about how these objects––though seemingly practical and unromantic––carried all of our weight. The weight of our shoes and of our bare feet, the weight of our thumbs––the way we pressed them into the dipped handle of our coffee mug or the way we prodded softening fruit in the bowl in our kitchen. I was beginning to question the way we molded these shapes into glossed and glazed objects, dull and matte finished surfaces that always seemed to hold our weight. But what if they didn’t?
What if these daily items appeared to us, one day, suddenly changed? What if you ate a bowl of cereal only to see the exact indent of your thumb swirling in the patterns of milk and cinnamon? Would you blink? Would you cash in like the woman who saw Jesus etched in her buttered toast? Would you sell the dust collected from your ceiling fan or the contents of your vacuum bag if you knew it drew you closer to intimacy with god? Or would you savor the contents of this year’s and last year’s collection of lint and pet hair––now compact and unseen, smooshed together then discarded? Would you rub these objects––these soft paper shapes that resemble our weight––into altered forms on your perspiring palms? You can hold these clumps of dust and dander close, for no one will know that you now hold these miniature universes in your clenched fists."
[No one will know that imprinted in breakfast fares and distorted through crystallized fragments of stained glass mirrors and broken windshields we once touched.]
-Emma Joss, 2015
Artists: Joseph Artzt, Olivia Cater, Liz Finch, Kelsey Gray, Malcolm Hecht, Kristina Nelson, Leah Reusch, Lilly Kiser Taylor, and Clio Wilde.
the slight curve in the handle of a toothbrush, the unnoticed differences in patterned bathroom tiles. And about how these objects––though seemingly practical and unromantic––carried all of our weight. The weight of our shoes and of our bare feet, the weight of our thumbs––the way we pressed them into the dipped handle of our coffee mug or the way we prodded softening fruit in the bowl in our kitchen. I was beginning to question the way we molded these shapes into glossed and glazed objects, dull and matte finished surfaces that always seemed to hold our weight. But what if they didn’t?
What if these daily items appeared to us, one day, suddenly changed? What if you ate a bowl of cereal only to see the exact indent of your thumb swirling in the patterns of milk and cinnamon? Would you blink? Would you cash in like the woman who saw Jesus etched in her buttered toast? Would you sell the dust collected from your ceiling fan or the contents of your vacuum bag if you knew it drew you closer to intimacy with god? Or would you savor the contents of this year’s and last year’s collection of lint and pet hair––now compact and unseen, smooshed together then discarded? Would you rub these objects––these soft paper shapes that resemble our weight––into altered forms on your perspiring palms? You can hold these clumps of dust and dander close, for no one will know that you now hold these miniature universes in your clenched fists."
[No one will know that imprinted in breakfast fares and distorted through crystallized fragments of stained glass mirrors and broken windshields we once touched.]
-Emma Joss, 2015
Artists: Joseph Artzt, Olivia Cater, Liz Finch, Kelsey Gray, Malcolm Hecht, Kristina Nelson, Leah Reusch, Lilly Kiser Taylor, and Clio Wilde.
OPENING NIGHT
Joseph ArtztPainting facilitates impracticality. It lacks a necessary role in society. It has no utilitarian purpose.
That's not to say it can't have a job that could be useful. My work prods at the useful/useless nature of painting in an attempt to repurpose it as a tool rather than a method of cultural retention. I deconstruct and reconstruct paint to try and find the purpose it could have. House paint might have the mose visible use in its shades of periwinkle, mauve, and eggshell white. It beautifies our living spaces for the world to see. I look to house paint to try and find a more utilitarian job suitable for the home it decorates. |
Olivia CaterCreating ceramic pieces witha purpose in mind drives my enthusiasm. Utility combines with aesthetic intrigue creates a harmonizing dialog between object and operator.
Experiencing an everyday object becomes a reciprocal practice for piece and person when each approaches the interaction with intention. Being able to enjoy food and drink from an equally appealing vessel offers a holistic expereince that I have increasingly appreciated since working in ceramics. |
Liz FinchMy bed is in the way of the door. If you want to come in you must come into bed. The home is personal, the house is private, the gallery pretends to be public, surplus value harldy pretends, surplus space is made public, and so is my bed. I invite you into my most personal space: under the sheets and on top of my mattress.
I'm not sure if I want you here, but I guess it's okay. I might need you so that I can see myself, defined against the backdrop of those who are/aren't, were/weren't in my bed. The outline of my body is bounded by presences and absences, positive and negative spaces, figures that slide past ephemerally, like the shifting topography of blankets. When all of the sediments come to rest, you will be a fossil in the layers of blankets. Let's pass some bed time before it becomes geological time and my sheets turn to stone. |
Kelsey GrayThis piece functions for me as a way to dissect the memory I carry of a particular drawer in my father’s home growing up. It was brimming with Trident chewing gum, a product that truly fascinates me and functions as an emblem of my dad’s various neuroses. I found out recently that certain types of Trident are made with beef and pork gelatin.
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Malcolm HechtIt’s not only the windows and doors that separate us. All this damn wind! Droning over the engine, it’s the invisible instigator of our separateness. Can we talk to one another in such isolation? How do we een locate ourselves in the wherewherewhere? Is that the Grand Canyon? Is that you?
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Kristina NelsonI began sewing at a young age. By the time I was 14, I was making the majority of my own clothes. Nowadays I draw from this experience and translate those techniques I developed to create artworks. The processes I use - embroidery, sewing, weaving, and knitting -inherently speak to themes such as domesticity, femininity, feminism, the home, and traditions of the past.
I use art and documentation to stay in the moment and then accurately recall that moment in the future. In this process I memorialize people, places, events, feelings, and thoughts from my past. Each art piece I create is like a time capsule - the significance and implications of each memory are actualized into a tangible product. I have found that the map of life is confusing, tedious, and random, and like to retrace this map often. Sometimes I retrace more than I planned. Sometimes I find myself obsessively retracing that retracing. I use art to retrace. |
Leah ReuschI explore the human environment of art pieces, the healing energy that is hidden in the disconnect between moments of common ground and moments of abstraction. My work shares a space and energy with my body such that presenting it can feel all-consuming, such a connection makes me passionately intrigued; I can paint something which is just barely abstracted to me, but if I show it to someone else they might not see it at all, in yet, practicing art has still become how I interact with and connect energetically with other people, both physically, and emotionally. This work examines a way of confronting my own personal energy embodied by my work, it feels out the ways in which space both energizes and is energized by my artbody and by viewers. My art practice navigates the interactions of human perception such that I may greet a more spiritual space of interaction and of self. Raw craft materials in my work act as visceral sticking points, as common gestures of perceiving touch and smell; I value such trivial materials so that I can intentionally build up from the mutual (and seemingly mindless) human interaction with space that is embodied by such material. that mindless interaction, that unseen human energy in the space of my material, pins down the delicate frustration and ambiguous fear I see embodied in possible iscommunications of abstraction. I then put that material into a space - and time- sensitive install, seeing human energy is a cherished system of space. My process then becomes a study and experience of the space embodied by human perception itself, a way to build material and consequently space, interaction, and self, up from that ragile disconnect and into the strong energy and light of honest connections where we may simply listen to reverence.
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Lilly Kiser Taylor
Exhibited a 3D anaglyph drawing of the surface of mars.
Clio WildeI have very few memories of Texas. The ones I do have are piecey at best, almost entirely fabricated from photographs or strictly kinesthetic: sweating in a car seat, swallowing toothpaste the floor-length curtains in the kitchen. I don’t remember what the house looked like from the outside, but I remember the rubbery sound my knees would make against the bottom of the bathtub and the ugly wooden underbelly of my father’s baby grand piano. I remember eating Fruity Pebbles in the mornings beside my sister, but I don’t recall the way the furniture was positioned in the bedroom she and I shared. I wish I could remember the words to the songs my mother says I used to make up on long car rides rather than the exact order in which the sloppy little shapen marshmallows were listed off in the Lucky Charms jingle, but there’s something kind of relieving about the total lack of control we have over the categorization of our early life. Instead, whenever I eat sugar cereal, I miss Texas.
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