“Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.”
The current show at Cherry and Martin’s auxiliary space presents a tightly knit arrangement of clay-based works by four artists who share an interest, as the title suggests, in pushing clay to its limits, rejecting the pristine, sleek aesthetic of traditional ceramics and embracing instead the volatility—and expressiveness—of chemical processes native to the craft.
Katy Cowan’s slip-cast objects, dangling from wall-bound rope, are seemingly the most restrained, although hammers, donuts, and two-by-fours made from stoneware squarely—if politely—refuse functionality. Cowan’s assemblages feel light and twee next to William J. O’Brien’s roughly hewn sculptures, which look as though they’ve been lacquered with Technicolor finger paint. The masklike quality of his objects is heightened in one of the gallery’s centerpieces, Untitled, 2015, an eight-foot-tall totem pole of hand-built vertical vessels sandwiched between horizontal ceramic “landscapes.” From a distance, the work exudes monumentality; close up, it rewards roving attention to all of the nooks and crannies that pockmark its surface.
Takuro Kuwata and Adam Silverman extend the emphasis on failure and accident even further. Kuwata uses a firing technique called Ishihaze, or “stone explosion,” in which impurities in the clay erupt to create bulbous protrusions. The result can be seen in a work such as Sweating Momoko with Make-Up, 2014, a knee-high gumdrop marked by scatological clumps of mud (the explosions) that disrupt a cheerful palette of pastels and metallics, melding wabi-sabi with kawaii. Silverman allows glaze to run wild quite literally, so that it oozes down the sides of his objects, pooling around their bases—decoration becoming integral to form. His largest piece, Untitled, 2015, takes this principle to its logical end: The work consists of about eight distinct vessels stacked in a squat, round kiln, all enrobed in a velvety shade of indigo and fused to one another and to the kiln itself. What would ordinarily be considered a studio disaster becomes instead a paean to the inextricability of process and product.
