Richmond Art Gallery's Materially Speaking questions the value of the handmade

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      Materially Speaking
      At the Richmond Art Gallery until June 9

      Conditioned as we are by new media, digital technology, and poststudio art practice, it’s fascinating to witness the re-emergence of hands-on, craftlike engagement with materials and objects. That’s not to say that there’s been a retreat from issues and ideas. Each of the artists featured in the Richmond Art Gallery’s delightful group show Materially Speaking operates within a concept-driven, postmodern context. Still, Jen Aitken, Lou Lynn, Brendan Lee Satish Tang, and Julie York find ways to employ traditional materials such as glass, clay, bronze, and fabric while also questioning our beliefs about craft, skill, and the value of the handmade.

      Lynn, who is based in the Slocan Valley, first established herself as a glass sculptor in the 1980s. Over the past decade, she has drawn thematic and formal inspiration from her personal collection of antique hand tools while working with a combination of hot- or cold-worked glass and cast bronze. A stellar example is her wall-mounted installation Tools as Artifacts, which consists of a long horizontal line of 42 small, tool-like objects (reading left to right, this line suggests a narrative or possibly evolutionary relationship among individual components). While many of them have bronze “handles”, their working ends are often made of nonsensically shaped glass elements. Twisted or pointed, upturned or looped, drippy or squiggly, they bestow the “artifacts” with a surrealistic aspect, contributing to the overall impression of nonfunctionality that the glass itself conveys. By producing tools that can’t be used, Lynn smudges the line between the supposed usefulness of “craft” and the freedom from mere utility we ascribe to “high art”. Meaning slides around elusively.

      Within the past year, I’ve reviewed solo exhibitions by both Aitken (at the Trench gallery last May) and Tang (at Gallery Jones last October). Both are showing similar bodies of work here: Tang, his Manga Ormolu series of ceramic vessels, marrying late Ming dynasty forms and motifs with references to Japanese manga and anime; and Aitken, synthetic fabric sculptures that riff on everything from furniture to viscera to underwater life. What these smart and technically accomplished artists do continues to amuse, engage, and trouble me—and I mean trouble in the best possible sense.

      Of all the works on view, York’s have the least handmade and most intellectualized feeling about them. Her slip-cast ceramic forms are produced using plaster moulds based on objects created by a 3-D printer, and her laser-cut paper drawings are also computer-assisted. Both the white-on-white drawings and the glossy white miniature vessels reference York’s analyses of ceramics created by five esteemed and influential 20th-century studio potters: Robert Chapman Turner, Shoji Hamada, Lucie Rie, Peter Voulkos, and Beatrice Wood. In York’s installation, Symbols and Connections, the framed, wall-mounted drawings seem to assert mastery over the miniature and repetitive ceramic forms, which are set in long rows on ankle-level baseboards. As curator Nan Capogna writes in her exhibition text, the baseboards and the skeletal structure of the drawings create an architectural context for the domestic forms of the vessels. We are prompted to think again about the nature of craft, the hierarchy of materials and practices, and the way we assign meaning and value to some forms and not to others.

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