Tony Marsh
Tony Marsh has contributed to contemporary ceramics as an artist, educator and innovator for over 30 years. His vessels are non-utilitarian, the forms elementary and symmetrical. On view in this exhibition are sculptures from his current series, Crucibles & Cauldrons- prototypical shapes providing the architecture for his unique experimental surface amalgamation.
Through alchemy, intuitive wisdom, science and thermal adversity, Tony Marsh opens the window for random, unexpected surface topographies. These works encapsulate all the knowledge he’s amassed over the years with “various material and mineral concoctions”, layered, fired, then repeating the process. “In this work there are real and imagined allusions to physical sciences, earth formation, geographic phenomenon, force, pyroclastic work, time and landscape.” Marsh leaves all technical notes and trails blank, a deliberate amnesia, as he allows the accident of formula, material, firing and stress to unfold each vibrant, eruptive sculpture.
Tony Marsh was recently named a United States Artists Fellow in 2018, an honor awarded to outstanding contributors in American Arts and Letters. Marsh is Professor at California State University, Long Beach, chairing the Ceramics Department for 25 years (1995 – 2015). Marsh is the founding Director of the Center for Contemporary Ceramics (2017), a national and international residency program on the campus of CSULB. He has been a Visiting Artist and Lecturer at over 60 institutions and foundations including the Chicago Art Institute, Kansas City Art Institute, UCLA, Parsons School of Design, Alfred University and Seoul National University. His ceramic sculpture is included in over thirty permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Art and Design, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Oakland Museum of Art; Gardiner Museum of Art, Toronto; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Jose Museum of Art; ASU Art Museum Tempe and the Foshan Museum of Contemporary Art, Foshan, China.
Linda Sormin
Linda Sormin’s sculptures are a journey through personal archeology. Her open-ended ceramics enfold many voices and labors, from the donated memorabilia of friends and strangers in distant places, to the hands of those assisting, to the dumpster diving, searching for the discarded. The complex membranes of pinched clay provide a porous conduit bridging and breaking bonds, entwining stories and histories among those who define themselves through their separations.
Born in Thailand, working in North America, Europe and Asia, Sormin is influenced by kinetic energy, complexity, and disparate social/cultural/visual forces. While migration and identity form the backbone of the work, it’s the disruptive dissonance within her balletic balance that breathes life. The technical considerations of how Sormin’s work evolves are never far from the stories within. Multiple firings, various clays, smooth and rough surface, glaze, contrasting color, and cast away materials, are all integral elements in forming the non-linear narratives of discrete sculpture, and immersive installations.
Linda Sormin is Associate Professor of Studio Art at New York University, Steinhardt. Prior to NYU, Sormin was Professor of Ceramic Art at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University (2016 – 2019), and Associate Professor (2006- 2011) at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been extensively exhibited throughout Europe, the United States and Asia, including Jogja National Museum, Yogyakarta, Indonesia; CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark, Middelfart, Denmark; and West Norway Museum of Decorative Art, Bergen, Norway. Collections include the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, Alfred, NY; Arizona State University Art Museum; CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark, and others.
Demetri Broxton
Demetri Broxton’s first exhibition at PSG was in 2018, where he debuted embellished boxing gloves that unfold a complex narrative centered on the mythic stature of Black boxers, from Jack Johnson onward. Born in 1878, Johnson’s fame and legendary lifestyle was antithetical to the circumstances of Black Americans living under the extreme yoke of Jim Crow. Broxton’s narrative is also personal; his grandfather was a boxer during WWII. At this time, matches were often mixed-race. The boxing ring was the only environment where a Black man could lay hands on a white man and not forfeit his life. By their inherent form, Broxton’s gloves function as muses that summon multiple stories of struggles lost and won.
For this exhibition, Broxton will debut one majestic ceremonial boxing robe embellished with amulets of power, transgression, healing, peril, and protection in addition to several sets of boxing gloves. When defining his own ritual objects, Broxton often cites the sacred art of the Yoruba people in Nigeria, where ceremonial objects and costume are ornately beaded and adorned. The Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans, Louisiana, one place where Broxton traces his Louisiana Creole heritage, used similar beading techniques retained from the Transatlantic Slave Trade to design and embellish their traditional costumes.
Echoes of the erasure and colonization of diasporic Black people resound throughout Broxton’s sculptures, while providing equal weight to the triumphant voice of hip hop and graffiti, as revealed in the beaded lyrics on the face of the gloves. The formality and tradition of Broxton’s structure and techniques give breadth to the layers of complexity, and his use of materials speaks directly to ancestral history. He also understands his work as an ongoing investigation of cultural continuities from Africa to America, with particular attention to how ancient cultural forms find their way into mainstream culture.
DEMETRI BROXTON 2023 ONLINE EXHIBITION CATALOG
(Click for full screen, Press Escape to return to page)
Demetri Broxton‘s work as the Education Director of the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco is synonymous with his passion for educating and writing about the ideas inherent in every work of art. Born and raised in Oakland, CA, he earned a BFA at UC Berkeley in 2002 with an emphasis in painting. Upcoming and current exhibitions include Crafting Radicality: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift, de Young Museum, San Francisco and Second Skin, the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, CA. His work is included in museum collections nationally. Recent press includes Artforum, Culture Magazine, and L’Officiel.
Julia Couzens
There’s a centuries-strong tradition of artists working with fiber to wrap, stretch, contort and otherwise manipulate over, into, and around inanimate objects forming figurative and abstract sculptural forms. Sheila Hicks, Shinique Smith, and Outsider artist Judith Scott are among them. Julia Couzens’s hybrid practice expands upon this legacy of exploring the many aspects of working with fiber and textiles.
Receiving her MFA from the University of California, Davis, Julia Couzens began working with fiber in the 1990s. Conversant with Modernist sculptural traditions, she pivots craft and domestic textile traditions into drawing, painting and sculpture. Couzens views her studio practice as a collaboration with anonymous others as she stitches, bundles, and sutures fabrics that have history, or in lay terms, used, discarded, worn, damaged mercantile goods. Layering her collection of materials, she composes intricate fabrications into “metaphorical objects of memory.” With wire armatures these floating gestural riffs on tapestries punctuate the environment like elaborate woven satellites.
Julia Couzens received the The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, New York and the Art Matters Foundation Award, New York. Collections include Yale University Art Museum, New Haven, CT; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC; The Frederick Weisman Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, CA; University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, The Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco, CA. Exhibitions include Armand Hammer Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and Nevada Institute for Contemporary Art, Las Vegas, NV among others.
Helen O’Leary
Subverting our notion of painting into an unconventional organization of formal and organic relationships, Helen O’Leary assembles elegant formulations of broken wood and stretched fiber into the gestural lyricism of reimagined sculptural paintings. O’Leary describes herself as a painter who tells stories from the archeology and ruins of deconstructed materials within her studio. Growing up in Ireland and relocating to the United States, her sculptural paintings become the memoir of two countries, an idiosyncratic aggregate of fragile gridded fragments. Her accumulation of stretchers, panels, frames, & linen are cut into small pieces, retaining staples, glue and any number of sundry material for re-assemblage into the unconventional enigmatic paintings on view. “Throughout my career, I have been constructing a very personal and idiomatic formal language based in simple materials and unglamorous gestures, a framework which functions as a kind of syntactical grid of shifting equivalences. The ‘paintings’ that emerge from this process know their family history, a narrative of greatness fallen on hard times”.
Helen O’Leary was born in County Wexford, Ireland, and received her BFA and MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1991 she has been a Professor at the School of Visual Arts at Penn State University. O’Leary was recently awarded a John S. Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, as well as the 2018–19 Rome Prize and Italian Fellowship from The American Academy in Rome. Additional awards include two Pollock-Krasner awards, and a Joan Mitchell Award for painting and sculpture. Exhibitions include the National Gallery of Art, Limerick, Ireland; Glasgow Museum of Art, Glasgow, Scotland; The MAC, Belfast, Northern Ireland; Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia; and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY. Her work is represented in national and international collections. O’Leary lives and works in New Jersey and Ireland.
Toshiaki Noda
Toshiaki Noda was born in Arita, Saga Prefecture, Japan, a region noted for its remarkable porcelain ceramics dating back to the 1600s. His parents are ceramic dealers in this treasured craft, where Toshiaki lived in an incomparable aesthetic culture influencing his studio practice today. He studied printmaking at California State University, Long Beach where he received a BFA in 2008. His printmaking education combined with his aesthetic and technical training in Japan lends a unique vision to his ceramic practice.
Unlike the smooth, consistent surface of the treasured Imari wares, Toshiaki uses the plasticity of clay to push boundaries of form, and the alchemy of glaze to explore texture. Noda discards traditions, instead expresses temporal degradation, a throwaway culture through tears, cracks, crust – a sculptural manifestation of waste. With spontaneity and curiosity as his guide, his sculptural planes contort with tension. In his first exhibition at PSG we’ve combined several series of ceramics that have textural and structural adulteration tying the works together in a unique visual field.
In 2017 Toshiaki Noda was selected from 2,744 applicants for The New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship in Sculpture. Noda lives and works in New York, where he was employed as a studio assistant for Jeff Koons for several years. Recent exhibitions include Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo as well as exhibitions in Milan and New York.
Ramekon O’Arwisters
Ramekon O’Arwisters abstract sculpture dives into the abyss and the beautiful. With large sharp ceramic shards knotted together using shredded fabric and black zip ties, the sculptures stand as cultural totems, embodying the couture of drag, Black culture, African American quilting and religion. Growing up in Jim Crow South during the Civil Rights Movement, O’Arwisters had a safe haven, quilting with his Grandmother where he was “embraced, important and special.” These early memories prompted his nascent series of unique crocheted/ceramic sculptures titled, Mending. Employing ordinary household, or decorative pottery, broken and discarded, O’Arwisters combined traditional crafts into a dimensional woven tapestry, stripping both cloth and ceramic of their intended function.
In his 2019 series titled Cheesecake,O’Arwisters transformed the sculpture from something broken, needing mending, to fully determined and self-aware. Being Black and Queer, the full complexity of the moniker Cheesecake, used to objectify an attractive, sexualized man or woman is not lost to O’Arwisters. Instead he embraces it, subverting the demeaning implication in describing his said, “objects”. Combining lacy, embellished fabrics with ceramics contributed by students and faculty from California State University at Long Beach, O’Arwisters sculptural hybrids embody both danger and seduction in his bold ‘coming of age’ works.
Bitten, his new series of sculpture, takes off and embellishes upon Flowered Thorns, 2020-21. With Flowered Thorns, O’Arwisters exaggerates sharp ceramic shards to align with the biblical reference of Adam and Eve, the symbol of original sin derived from sexual pleasure. Bitten continues with soft and sharp elements as he laces implements of punishment and threat throughout the sculpture: black zip ties, rope and clamps. O’Arwisters recontextualizes the danger as an erotic entanglement of sexual fantasy and play, placing the sculpture on a new metaphoric plane.
RAMEKON O’ARWISTERS 2023 ONLINE EXHIBITION CATALOG (A Chorus of Twisted Threads) (Click for full screen, Press Escape to return to page)
Ramekon O’Arwisters is the 2021 recipient of the McLaughlin Foundation Award for The Project Space at Headlands Center for the Arts, Artist-in-Residence program and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for 2020/21. Past artist-in-residence programs include the de Young Museum Artist in Residence; The Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; the Djerassi Resident Artists Program; Recology San Francisco Artist in Residence Program and the Vermont Studio Center. Grants and Awards include Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, NY; the San Francisco Foundation; the San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Initiatives Program; Black Artists Fund, Sacramento; and the Eureka Fellowship awarded by the Fleishhacker Foundation in San Francisco. Museum exhibitions include the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design, FIGHT AND FLIGHT: CRAFTING A BAY AREA LIFE; American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA), Making in Between: Gender Identities in Clay (MIB:GIC); and San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, Queer Threads. O’Arwisters is the founder of Crochet Jam, a community arts project infused with folk-art traditions that foster a creative culture in cooperative relationships. Born in Kernersville, North Carolina, O’Arwisters earned a M.Div. from Duke University Divinity School in 1986.
Gail Wight
Gail Wight’s wit and humor usually suspend our disbelief with her elegant reformulations. The Spider and the Fly, Wight takes fly wings she collected from succumbed flies, and magnifies them many fold. She then composes exquisite botanical gardens that are breathtakingly complex. “Working primarily in sculpture, video, interactive media and print, I attempt to construct biological allegories that tease out the impacts of life sciences on the living: human, animal, and other. The interplay between art and biology, theories of evolution, cognition and the animal state-of-being are themes that have, over the last two decades, become central to my art.”
Wight’s continued interest in deep time manifested in earlier exhibitions where she created complex photographic mandalas from tiny rodent fossil remains, Ground Plane, 2012. With The Spider and the Fly, Wight expanded upon the fossil record creating future relics where flies became flowers. “The fossil record for insects dates back approximately 400 million years. Often, when I find an expired fly on my studio windowsill, Iʼm comforted by the knowledge that these small creatures will most likely be glancing their way around spider webs long after the human-centric environment outside my window has disappeared. Thereʼs a lovely concept in biology called “convergence”, which attempts to explain the emergence of similar characteristics among vastly different plants and animals. In The Spider and the Fly, I toy with the visual manifestations of convergence, and hint at potential psychological similarities.”
Gail Wight is Professor in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University where she focuses on experimental media. Her work has been exhibited internationally in venues including: the Natural History Museum, London, UK; the National Art Museum of China, Beijing; Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK; and Foxy Productions, New York City, NY. Wightʼs art has been featured in: Art & Science Now by Stephen Wilson; Ingeborg Reichleʼs Kunst aus dem Labor and Art in the Age of Technoscience; Sherry Turkleʼs Evocative Objects; thing world: International Triennial of New Media Artedited by Zhang Ga and Fan Diʼan; and Bioart by William Myers as well as many other books and catalogs. Collections include: MoMA, Yale University, San Jose Museum of Art, Sevilleʼs Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo; Rene di Rosa Foundation; and Berkeley Art Museum among others. Wight was nominated as a Visionary Pioneer of Media Art by Ars Electronica in 2014.
Victoria Jang
Victoria Jang’s new ceramic sculpture, layered with multiple narratives, composed in a period of darkness. With a vocabulary of decorative ornamental forms, Jang’s sculptures are a critical inquiry of ethnology as expressed through colonial ideology, stigmatizing indigenous cultural legacies.
First-generation Korean-American, Victoria Jang takes aim at assumptions of Western European culture in its understanding and interpreting of non-Western cultures as inferior, while historically appropriating traditions, rituals and objects for aesthetic and cultural exploitation. Her ceramic vessels become microcosms of deconstructed colonial hegemony. Focusing on Korean traditions found in native craft and materials, Jang creates a musical panoply of abstracted geometric and natural forms that she can use and reassemble. The ceramic sculptures are layered with these shapes – stemmed flower forms, ritual objects found in Korean Shamanism, surface aspects of urban erosion and decay – a fused assemblage of synthesized symbolist ornaments.
Victoria Jang received her BFA in ceramics and sculpture from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2010. She moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and received her MFA in ceramics at the California College of the Arts in 2014. Jang received a Headlands Graduate Fellowship Award, a Murphy Award and Cadogan Scholarship, and was the featured artist for the 2014 APAture exhibition at Kearny Street Workshop. She recently received the 2017–18 AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she continues to teach, and the Retired Professors Award by the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. She was a Visiting Artist in Residence for 2015-2016 at the University of California, Berkeley.
Jefferson Pinder
Interdisciplinary artist Jefferson Pinder gained national attention with the exhibition Frequency at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 2006. In this exhibition was Car Wash Meditations, a short video of a car rolling through a carwash to the music of Nas’s “Made You Look,” while explosive colors of soap manifest as action painting on the screen. The combination of sound and image is set against a profile of a Black man, Pinder, seated in the car. Such is the complexity of Pinder, who intuitively applies his knowledge of music, imagery, and performance to address complex issues of race, ethnicity, and class. Unfortunately events, recent and historical provide Pinder with no end of material that he powerfully and poetically composes in compelling performances. Troy Patterson of Slate Magazine, writing for Southern Living, praised Pinder’s work saying its impact “lies in its ability to provoke meaningful dialogue.” The Washington Post compared his early work to that of Jacob Lawrence saying, “Like all Pinder’s best videos, it is a simple conceit, simply realized. But it speaks simply of the same complexities that Jacob Lawrence did.”
Pinder says of his work, “Inspired by the symbiosis of music and the moving image, I portray the black body both frenetically and through drudgery in order to convey relevant cultural experiences. To get to the essence of this conversation, I place no restrictions on the tools that I employ as an artist, working with materials as disparate as neon lighting and found items in my sculptural stylizations. I find ways in which reclaimed materials convey rugged histories, relating them to a Black American experience.”
Pinder’s recent series of performances and video explore the horrific events of Red Summer of 1919. A crew of selected performers led by Jefferson Pinder brings disperse historical locations and events back into focus by re-enacting the turbulent events of the Red Summer of 1919 . Videos and performances including Float, Elaine, Fire and Movement, THIS IS NOT A DRILL and Sonic Boom were enacted at the location of each violent event and comprise Red Summer Road Trip. The performance documentation reflects on racism and trauma, with the hope of inspiring dialogue about history and the potential of change.
Jefferson Pinder (b. 1970, Washington, D.C.) has produced highly praised performance-based and multidisciplinary work for over a decade. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions including The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, The High Museum in Atlanta, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. and Tate Modern in London, UK.
In 2021 Jefferson Pinder was named a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow; a Guggenheim Fellow in 2017; a USA Joyce Fellowship Award in the field of performance in 2016, and in 2017 the Moving Image Acquisition award.
Jefferson Pinder received a BA in Theatre and MFA in Mixed Media from the University of Maryland, and studied at the Asolo Theatre Conservatory in Sarasota, FL. He was an Assistant Professor of theory, performance and foundations at the University of Maryland from 2003-2011. Pinder is currently Dean of Faculty, Professor in the Contemporary Practices department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
UPCOMING EXHIBITION: SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2020 (Opening & closing date TBA)