UndertheTable.pdf

As part of the National Council on Education in the Ceramic Arts 48th annual conference (NCECA), which will bring 5,000 visitors to Milwaukee in March, Portrait Society Gallery will host a related exhibition.

f(c), an exhibition curated by Madison’s Ariel Brice, will present the work of Thomas Müller, Krijn Christiaansen & Cathelijne Montens of KCCM, and Stephanie Davidson & Georg Rafailides of Touchy-Feely, from March 19th through April 12,,  2014.

Ariel Brice is an artist and lecturer in Ceramics at University of Wisconsin-Madison. The exhibition will feature designers, artists, and architects whose works play with tense structures, anticipation, and the performance of objects. “f” refers to function not in the sense customarily associated with ceramics, but instead in the mathematical sense: a finite yet unknown number of output possibilities based on the value to which it defers in the parentheses that follow.  “c” refers to the specific material conditions of clay and ceramic.

KCCM was founded by Krijn Christiaansen (1978) and Cathelijne Montens (1978). The work of these two young Dutch designers explores the ways public spaces and landscapes are made, used, lived in, transformed and shaped by people.  Their research and design interventions emanate from their home and studio in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands to global locations such as Serbia, Romania, Indonesia, Hungary, Japan, and most recently, to the Portrait Society Gallery in the USA. They teach design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.

Founded by Architects Stephanie Davidson and Georg Rafailidis in 2006 Touchy-Feely is a platform for haptic design in architecture and is a specialized branch of their architecture practice DAVIDSON RAFAILIDIS.  Based in Buffalo, NY where they live and teach Architecture at SUNY Buffalo, they develop close relationships with material manufacturers and production facilities in Europe and America, to develop architectural applications for new projects and material innovations.  Using an experimental approach to materials and an interest in incidental design, T -FEELY aims to provoke curiosity in, and more physical interaction with, the built environment.

Thomas Müller is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California.  He was born in Cape Town, South Africa and spent his childhood growing up in Africa, the United States and Europe.  Growing up in such disparate locales and cultures has inevitably influenced his work, in particular as it relates to language, time, memory and space.

He maintains an active studio practice and shows artwork locally, nationally and internationally.  He has lectured and been a visiting artist at universities and art institutions around the country and is currently teaching at Loyola Marymount University.  He uses time as a sculptural element to create a sense of tension and places the work perennially in the present tense.  He explores ideas of the ephemeral, the nature of language and the nature of objecthood. All of the participants in this exhibition have participated in artist residencies at sundaymorning@ekwc located in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands.  Formerly titled the European Ceramic Workcentre, sundaymorning@ekwc is an internationally renowned ceramic work centre where visual artists, designers, architects and other creative professionals can explore the artistic possibilities of ceramics.

This exhibition is included in the roster of Concurrent Independent Exhibitions taking place during the 48th annual 2014 NCECA conference Material World that runs March 19th to 22nd.   A public reception will be held at the gallery on Thursday March 20th from 7 – 11 PM.

Pea with Giraffes

I’m making available a small scale version of the “Pea with Giraffes” image (a giant green pea being gazed upon by a herd of pink giraffes) from the sculpture of the same name. I am doing a numbered and signed limited edition of 100 selling at $200/print. Scale is 8″ x 10″.

Please see orinal image and sculpture: Pea with Giraffes

If you are interested in purchasing one, while they are still available, please message me or email me directly.

Thank you for all of your support!

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 23, 6:00 – 8:30pm
Exhibition: March 23 – April 27, 2013

Please join us for the opening reception of Nothing Rhymes with Orange Saturday, March 23, 6 – 8:30 with the artist in attendance.
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Project 4 is pleased to present, Nothing Rhymes with Orange, a solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist, Thomas Müller. This will be Thomas Müller’s third solo exhibit at Project 4.
Born in South Africa to Swiss and German parents, Thomas Müller became fluent in Afrikaans, Bantu, English, German, and Zulu. The experience of learning, interchanging, and later forgetting multiple dialects has greatly influenced Müller’s work. In, Nothing Rhymes with Orange, Müller presents sculptures and drawings that continue his exploration of language, its ambiguity and its transience.

By creating ceramic letterform sculptures, Müller materializes language, freeing it from the page and thrusting it into our environment. He transforms letters and phrases into objects, spelling out expressions such as “¡buenos dias!,” and “I am the man in the gray flannel suit!” in three dimensions on the gallery floor. Not accounting for gravity or a typographical baseline, if a letter is top-heavy or unbalanced, it can topple over and even break, exposing the internal space. The viewer must physically confront the letters; maneuvering around the sculpture, deciphering broken pieces, and simultaneously seeing and reading the forms.

By allowing the sculptures to break and shatter, Müller reveals the interior architecture of the letterforms. Curves, line, and color are revealed removing the contextual limitations of language and reducing it to pure form. Müller’s physical treatment of language calls attention to its inadequacies, its fragility, and ability to be misinterpreted. Through materializing language, Müller pushes it from the literal, to the physical, and then to the abstract.
Thomas Müller (b.1971 Cape Town, South Africa) earned his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and his BFA in Ceramics from the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington. Müller’s work has been featured in exhibitions throughout the US and abroad including shows at the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA, the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA, Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Fort Worth, TX, Kristi Engle Gallery, Los Angeles, California, and the Artinus Gallery, Seoul, Korea. His work has been mentioned in publications such as Art in America, The Korea Times, the Phoenix New Times, LA Weekly, and Ceramics Monthly, among others. Müller currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

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In July 1955, Disneyland debuted its Tomorrowland attraction to the public. The futuristic park-within-a-park was near and dear to Walt Disney himself, a product of his Space Age fascination, and featured such radical early exhibits as the TWA Moonliner rocket ship, Autopia and the Monsanto House of the Future, all conceived to give visitors a glimpse of what life might look like in the far-off year 1986.

Now in its third iteration, Tomorrowland seems as outmoded to the non-Disneyfied as the idea of partying like it’s 1999. But for curator Samantha Fields, its premise provides fertile ground for interpretation in an eight-person group show currently on view at Cal State Northridge. Like its namesake, Fields’ “Tomorrowland” is forward-looking, yet in the hands of the participating artists — Lisa Adams, Libby Clarke, Daniel Dove, Trygve Faste, Sean Higgins, Kelly McLane, Thomas Müller and Klutch Stanaway — the future is not so much a gleaming biodome of innovation as a damaged landscape whose human inhabitants are scarcely visible.

Fields, an artist herself, says, “In my own work, dystopia has been an interest for a while, because it has a timeless quality. Our desire for a perfect society, a utopia, is universal, and dystopias are almost always utopias gone wrong.”

The artists she selected for “Tomorrowland” all explore, with varying degrees of pessimism, the idea that well-intentioned human progress just might leave behind a junkyard of misguided ambition.

Technology, for example, may be synonymous with advancement and interconnectedness today, but in “Tomorrowland,” Fields says, it’s presented as “something that can’t save us [and that] is no good if we aren’t there to operate it.” Dove’s Exploded View is one piece that speaks to this grim prediction: Though lushly rendered in oils, the painting’s rusted pickup truck trapped inside a long-neglected jungle gym introduces a milieu that Fields calls “sick and anemic, empty but for these husks.” Similarly, Fallen Lander, Stanaway’s indeterminate space rover, which appears to have plummeted back to Earth and shattered on the gallery floor, expresses “the potential of technology tinged with a sense of futility.”

Other artists in this exhibition focus on the precarious fate of the natural environment, fabricating scenes that may seem familiar until closer inspection reveals elements as yet unknown to us. Higgins’ Dark Days, Night Lights photograph shows a moonlit river — yet there’s no light source anywhere in the ink-black sky. The subject of Vulture, by Müller, teeters overhead on wooden beams, ready to attack easy pickings at the slightest provocation — but it’s not an actual bird, it’s the word “vulture” spelled out in sculpted Helvetica letters.

In Adams’ painting The Order of Entropy, an oval moon illuminates an unlikely burst of flowers from a wire-wrapped stump — a tableau the artist describes as a “collision between the natural world and the human-built environment. I love images of … nature’s reclamation of that scenario. The rage to live is so vivid in these instances, and produces a kind of dystopic paradise.”

McLane investigates a different type of renewal in the often-turbulent intersection of past and present (or present and future, as the case may be), referring to historical events as a framework for examining current conflicts. In her large-scale painting Queer, a carnival gone awry serves as the backdrop for a Native American slaughter overseen by Napoleon. Not only does the work intimate a self-perpetuating cycle of “the powerful eliminating the weak,” Fields says, but “it’s hard to look at the flooded circus tent and not think of the submerged roller coaster off the coast of New Jersey in the wake of Superstorm Sandy.”

All hope is not lost in “Tomorrowland,” though. Clarke (aka Monstress), for instance, provides a set of visual aids to happiness in a troubled society. Her Perspectiflex, a cardboard wheel with a spinning arrow that points the viewer toward possible explanations for other people’s aggravating actions, aims to “open your mind and lessen your feelings of displeasure.” And her Ardor Arbiter kit contains “citations” to be issued as either rewards or punishments for certain behaviors. These and Clarke’s other mood-regulating devices all point to better living through artistry.

It’s a lesson Faste has learned as well: He says his slick, ultra-abstract Turboform paintings are designed in part to draw attention to a “latent cultural desire that somehow the future will be more promising than the present.” As a designer, he uses technology to solve everyday problems, and he employs this same approach in his art, supplementing his traditional painting techniques with tools like 3-D modeling and rapid prototyping. The result is a series of deconstructed canvases that from some angles look like aftermarket Millennium Falcons with ’80s airbrushing, and from other viewpoints resemble a tangle of neon blocks and beams that could be paving a path to an undiscovered galaxy — if only we could figure out where to step first.

The Disneyland website proudly proclaims: “Here in Tomorrowland, the future is today!” The sentiment is not lost on Fields and the eclectic crew she’s enlisted to tease out her vision of what’s in store for us, but the new world that her “Tomorrowland” forecasts favors doom and gloom over blind faith. There are moments of optimism, to be sure, but this isn’t an amusement park — and in real life, well, it’s like Fields says: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

TOMORROWLAND | California State University Northridge, 18111 Nordhoff St., Northridge | Through Dec. 8 | csun.edu/artgalleries