Clay? III

Related Content

• The Fussy Eye: Out of the Kiln
  April 7, 2010
• Clay Throwdown!
  August 18, 2010
• The Weekly Wire: The Week's Recommended Events
  August 25, 2010

More About

• Arun Sharma
• Rumi Koshino

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

There’s a reason for the question mark in the name of this show. The 17 artists in Clay? III are working with materials—like plastic, polystyrene, LED lights, wood—that definitely were not fired in a kiln. But that’s the point of the show: To get you thinking about the ancient form, pottery, and how it’s lately evolved. Some creations, like Raymond W. Gonzalez’s blinking, star-shaped dingbats, appear like satellites dropped from space. More elaborate, yet no less ingenious, is a low, porcelain train trestle set on wooden blocks by Rumi Koshino. Yet the most interesting work, up in the loft, is made of pixels and water—a video installation by Arun Sharma. His (de)Composition places an unglazed clay bust in what appears to be a bubbling fish tank, then lets the figure gradually decay. It’s like a pathos-free drowning man, an exercise in artistic self-erasure. However much work Sharma put into the bust, the water insidiously undoes. How long this process takes is open to question. Hours? Days? Weeks? The gallery card doesn’t indicate a run-time for the video, so you’re encouraged to cycle back among the other ceramics, returning periodically to see how much of the sculpture remains. Or you can just stare at it, like Warhol’s Empire, an oddly calming experience not unlike the fish tank at your dentist’s office. Eventually the crumbling figure will be reduced to a pile of sodden soil. Which, millennia ago, is precisely where pottery began. BRIAN MILLER
Mondays-Fridays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Starts: March 18. Continues through May 4, 2010