The Center for Contemporary Art in Bedminster welcomes the new year with a fresh trio of exhibitions. A small group show and two solo offerings spotlight Jersey artists with distinctive styles and singular approaches, including two who have refined playing with fire to a virtuoso method of expression.
The three shows officially launch with a free public reception from 6 to 8 p.m. tonight.
Venerable Garden State icon Mel Leipzig curated a presentation of selected works by Hamilton Square resident Dallas Piotrowski. The nature artist and story illustrator devotes her masterful skills of composition and delineation almost exclusively to depicting wildlife and ecosystems, often with an odd, eye-catching twist.
“Whatever I paint, I try to capture the true character and spirit of the wildlife,” said Piotrowski. “But my main objective will always be to nurture a love of nature.”
The center’s chair of exhibitions, artist Wes Sherman, gathered works by five contemporary artists for the “Nature” group show. The display features evocative and enigmatic paintings by Katrina Bello, architecturally informed painted structures by Jessica Demcsak, Jason Middlebrook’s multimedia geometric nature meditations, Naomi Reis’s ephemeral floral evocations, and the plasmic ceramics of Ben Suga.
“Each of these artists creates art with a direct narrative from nature to object,” Sherman commented.
Suga’s bloated, amoebic clay forms represent the culmination of a lengthy, covert, and calculated creative process that begins at New Jersey construction sites.
“My work enacts a hidden process within a more public process,” he said.
At night or on weekends, he visits excavated sites and gathers mud and other materials exposed by heavy construction equipment. He refines this “prima materia” in his studio, using skills and methods acquired through a long and arduous apprenticeship with Richard Bresnahan in Minnesota.
Suga then exposes the resulting substance to ordeal by fire until it liquefies and slumps under the dual pressures of heat and gravity, at which point he shuts down and seals the kiln.
“Over the course of a day, the piece slowly cools and solidifies as a permanent representation of mutability,” he said.
Suga documents the construction sites on film as a means of documenting the larger context from which his work arises. His elaborate methodology injects him directly into the dynamics of a space undergoing rapid metamorphosis.
“These sites expose eons of geologic time only to be quickly paved under the blacktop of a parking lot,” Suga said. “What is exposed in an instant? And what can be exposed in that which has been exposed?”
The lobby holds a faculty exhibition of work by John Reinking, who has headed the center’s ceramics program since 2010. He specializes in the centuries-old, highly demanding method of Anagama wood firing, which requires unceasing attention from the artist and his friends and students for days on end.
“We burn through an excess of six cords of wood in four days,” Reinking said. “All the ash that’s created as we reach 2400 degrees fahrenheit circulates and melts on the nearly 700 pieces in the kiln.”
The chemical interactions between flame and ash and the minerals within the clay produce natural glazes with vast variations in texture, color, and thickness. Loading the kiln requires vivid and accurate anticipation of the fiery maelstrom’s pathways, which literally paint the pots with flame.
“These pieces exhibit a story, like a life lived,” Reinking said. “They display their life experiences through cracks, flame marks and ash deposits.”
Reinking’s pots possess a rugged charisma that counterbalances their lack of refinement and conventional aesthetic appeal. They exert a raw charm, proudly displaying the scars and scorch-marks etched through their phoenix-like generation. “A closer look reveals beauty in the imperfections,” said Reinking. “Ash oozing down the side, or melting to a pool of glass in a depression, or flame marks painted onto the surface, or a suggestive crack that serendipitously appears.”
The imposing gravity and dignity of Reinking’s Anagama pottery proclaim character earned through suffering.
“These pieces become unique individuals,” Reinking said, “and in some cases, survivors.”
Resource: http://www.dailyrecord.com
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