06/04/12

Story by Bruce Hartman, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art

.SUM exhibition at Nerman Museum features sculptural installations

.SUM exhibition at Nerman Museum features sculptural installations

Matthias Merkel Hess, Bucketry II, 2010-2012, clay and glaze. Courtesy of the artist and ACME., Los Angeles.

Arlene Shechet, Borrowed from Ghosts, 2011 (left), glazed and fired ceramic and solid wood, 74"x18"x14". Collection Paul Dierkes, New York. Air Time, 2007 (right), glazed ceramic, cast bronze, steel and painted plywood, 60"x31"x22”. Collection Mark Pollack, New York.

William J. O’Brien, Untitled (X), 2012, clay, glaze, metal, paint, felt, twine, plaster, carpet, wood, wax, foam, glitter, paper, cloth and plastic. Courtesy of Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago.

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. – .SUM, a new exhibition at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art at Johnson County Community College, features three major sculptural installations. It will be on view through Sept. 2. 

Artists Matthias Merkel Hess, William J. O’Brien and Arlene Shechet employ clay as a sculptural medium for their respective works. In addition, site-specific installations are a critical aspect of each artist’s practice. For .SUM, the Nerman Museum invited Merkel Hess, O’Brien and Shechet to each create an installation for one of the museum's first-floor galleries.

Los Angeles artist Mathias Merkel Hess’ Bucketry II is comprised of hand-built sculptures which faithfully mimic mass-produced objects: trash cans (particularly the Rubbermaid Brute), milk crates, laundry baskets, buckets, gas cans and beverage coolers. Through attentive work of the hand and a variety of glazing techniques, Merkel Hess transforms mundane, generic items that are made to look absolutely uniform into distinct, one-of-a-kind pieces. The containers' drab, industrial colors have been replaced by vibrant hues (garnet, emerald, periwinkle, lemon) and rich, earthy tones, a nod to glazes popular in California ceramics of the 1960s. The bland smoothness of the plastic forms has given way to organically mottled textures, a lively play of serendipitous drips and spots. The pieces feel newly precious, even as they retain something of the stubbornly ordinary. He’s endowed the generic and uniform with character, irregular grace and a sense of humor.

Chicago-based artist William J. O’Brien is best known for his riotous tableaux of ceramic, metal and mixed media sculptures. The accumulation of objects for his installation, Untitled (X), echoes the controlled mayhem of his studio – a place, the artist has said, where he is compelled to work in a nearly compulsive way. O’Brien’s sculptural tableaux blends many hybrid precursors to create an immersive installation – a complex arrangement in which sources such as African masks, funerary monuments, modernist sculpture and the more contemporary embrace of textiles and ceramics coalesce. It is a powerful evocation of the vibrant past of a so-called “decorative” art, whose legacy, in O’Brien’s hands, becomes a rich embodiment of the vast and polyglot history of sculpture and ceramics for the pluralist 21^st century.

A New York studio-based artist, Arlene Shechet, has been making sculptures for more than two decades. And, while Shechet found clay to be her primary medium some six years ago, her most recent works demonstrate a shift toward a new body of dynamic forms that stretch the limits of her material and reveal her ongoing exploration of imperfection and impermanence and function as a vehicle for transformation, vulnerability and grace. Her works on view precariously defy their own weight, lean against themselves, opening interiors in spouts and drips, coil with energetic fecundity in luscious glazes and sit stoically while seemingly reaching in multiple directions at once. As paradoxical forms – simultaneously awkward and self-supporting – they demonstrate a poetic relationship to the nature of human experience in all of its imperfections and miraculous possibility.

 The Nerman is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday; noon to 5 p.m. on Sunday. It is closed Mondays and on college holidays.

Admission to the museum and parking are free. For more information, visit nermanmuseum.org or call 913-469-3000.

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