Calvin Ma's Homebodies, Outside Looking In

When I first saw the card for the Sherrie Gallerie's September show of Calvin Ma, I couldn't wait to see it. When I saw it, I wondered if I hadn't been a little hasty in my enthusiasm. Ma's  Animal Instincts, a show filled with strangely articulated human figures displayed in relation to non-domesticated animals, is very odd.

Both of my reactions, though—one to their silly gaiety; the other to their awkward mystery—seem to be equally important in appreciating this quirky, almost obsessively detailed work. Although "quirky" is inching toward its place as a term of critical approbation, I remain shy of it as an enduing aesthetic concept, or as one that will hold its appeal across the generations.

Calvin Ma, Look Ahead. Ceramic, glaze, stain. 12x5x7".
Courtesy, Sherrie Gallerie

Calvin Ma, detail, Look Ahead

The term "construction" seems better than "sculpture" to fit Ma's works, for they have the exaggerated joints and fittings that marionettes and stuffed toys have. They are figurative but more decorative and abstract than realistic. While the artist has invested infinite care in the manufacture of fine details, that care hasn't been spent creating illusions of visible reality. They may be, however, profoundly realistic, clear delineations of what the inner eye sees. 

Ma exploits the metaphor of eyes as windows. The eyes of many figures rest behind frames and sills, but we're still left to wonder why since the expression is so flat: There seems nothing to protect with an extra layer. If we try to invade the figure's privacy, there appears to be nothing of interest. Those shaded eyes seem to yield neither information nor expression. 

Calvin Ma, figure from Animal Instincts

But it's the inner eye that Ma is about, we can keep looking. On the sides of several figures' heads are more windows and in those we find hidden figures peering out at us obliquely. Their own secret heads are fully formed, and they glance out from positions of hiding.

These unexpected faces peering as it were from secret attics, hidden away where one is certainly not expecting to find them, remind us of the Anne Frank's, the fleeing American slaves, or the millions of others who, over the centuries have been stowed in airless garrets to avoid detection or being overtaken by persecutors.

The heads of Ma's people are in themselves houses: Ma calls them, accurately and poetically, "homebodies."
It's not a stretch to see the people at the side windows as the people trapped inside the artist's head—as those trapped in Everyman's head. Ma personally speaks to the issue of social anxiety and he relates the motivation for this body of work to his reality as a shy person who prefers his inner life to the company of others. He has found a phenomenally accurate and potent way to express a state of feeling. 

Calvin Ma, Stretched Thin. Ceramic, glaze, stain,14x6x9"
Courtesy of the Sherrie Gallerie

Ma's homebodies don't experience the world only through perception, through vision and thought. Several of the figures in the show have, like Stretched Thin, portals where we locate the heart and the guts, other places we all know our anxieties to manifest themselves as turmoil and pain.

The figures in this show are all paired with animals. Their connections are not easy. The people balance tenuously either because they are as awkward as such mechanically jointed people would be, or because there isn't much sympathy between the species. It could be, too, that animals are introverts. They want to be left alone.

Calvin Ma, Falling Behind, detail, fox's
belly below, human figure above.

The detail from "Falling Behind," a piece that shows a fox and a person both falling upside down, reveals a door on the fox's belly. Most of the animals have such openings, but they are posed in ways that obscure them. (Ma is meticulous enough to incorporate such details, even when they are unlikely to be seen.) These suggest, though, that the connection between the humans and the animals may not be in their relationships, but in the idea that all are feral in a primary way. Why does any creature  come out at all? Do society's rewards really live up to the promises made for them? Is our own company so poor or insulting?

Visually, I found this show to be a little tedious. More specifically, I found the extreme attention to detail, repeated so often and sincerely on material of the same size, colors, patterns, and concepts, came close to boring me.

But I think that what I found tedious has turned out to be one of the greatest appeals of Ma's work. With yet a week to go when I saw it, the show was within two works of having completely sold out despite the four-digit price tags. 

The similarities that I though bordered on the bland are probably part of the great appeal Ma's work has had for audiences and purchasers. The repetition of features, shapes, and colors may very well be explained simply by self-portraiture on Ma's part. Then it is simply a way to represent one thing that appears many times. 

Perhaps it's more likely, though, that the lack of dramatic distinction is part of the point. "We all live in our heads. We're top-heavy with anxious thought and views of the world slanted by the oblique views we take from hidden places. We are probably like most others, but fear makes us both big in imagination and small in fact; our senses of proportion are odd."

Calvin Ma, Falling Behind

Which brings me back to close with the "quirky" aspect of Ma's figures. Their look is definitely idiosyncratic. They have a sort of futuristic look from a retro position, which concerns me about possible satisfaction with a camp or short-lived aesthetic. Mitigating against this possible over reliance on "look," though, is Ma's commitment to craftsmanship and materials. 

Ma's workmanship is warmly disciplined: He spares no detail, no matter how many times he must repeat the same stroke on one piece, let alone over a large series. No one labors like this in the interest of a look or style or attitude. One does this for compulsion at the least and conviction at the best; to solve a problem or to unlock a secret; to exorcise pain or to make space for the admission of some discovery. 

Ma is going to travel his road at his own pace, it's clear. I for one can put up with any outcomes in the interest of honest process, full of time to admit what surprises slip in along the way.

Porcelain of the Possessed: Julie Elkins at Sherrie Gallerie

Julie Elkins, Lily Can't Sleep. Porcelain and porcelain stains. Author photo.
Note tiny bed in midst of rubble at top of the sculpture.

Julie Elkins' porcelain is positively weird. It's the sort of thing that stops you in your tracks, sets your jaw dangling in disbelief, and your eyes scanning the corners for secret cameras: "Is this a joke?" Elkins' current show at the Sherrie Gallerie in Columbus, due to close the week after Thanksgiving, is full of late-October, perilous, gothic exaggerations: abandoned, derelict buildings; deep earth packed with mortal remains; lonely shacks shuddering in the wind; and spooky, talking tree stumps of the rotted, Halloween sort. And yet, here we are in the gallery of Joe Bova and the sublime Davide Salvatore. On the other hand, we are alerted that we are in for something different here. The name of the show is, "Misadventures of a Ceramic Artist Lost in Paradise."

If at first the visitor is surprised to see work that resembles set designs or storyboards for animations, they wouldn't be far off. Elkins is a story-teller who doesn't write, but who compresses her imaginings, which spring from the world observed around her, into one artifact at a time. Not an artist to work in the tradition of her material, Elkins brings her materials to her own narrative purposes. But if you insist on on the functional soul of ceramics and serve canapés off Lily Can't Sleep, then you've probably found a kindred soul in this artist.

Lily Can't Sleep, detail of room construction.
Author photo.

Elkins is a miniaturist on a monumental scale. In Lily Can't Sleep, above, she not only represents an abandoned, destroyed bedroom, down to the details of lathe behind the broken plaster wall, structural uprights behind the lathing, and the exterior wall executed brick by brick, but she has also articulated each element of the rubble, the precarious, post-disaster earth on which the ruin stands, and a blasted, anthropomorphized tree, clinging for dear life to the fragile world. Not only is the detail of the work awe-inspiring, but so is the feat of cantilevered work, miraculously stable despite its apparent will to fall over.

Lily Can't Sleep, detail of rubble.
Author photo

Elkins brings to her work in ceramics a willingness to tell stories in any medium available to her:  "I'm good at telling stories; I want to pull them from life wherever I see people interacting." As a child, she liked to draw people. This interest was continued when, as a teen, her father presented her with sections of a felled cherry tree and she learned how to use wood-burning equipment to draw portraits into the wood slabs. She is also a puppeteer, used to putting on silent plays that she and her husband devise—they write the scripts and make the puppets.

Julie Elkins, Yolandi the Sea Witch. Stoneware and stains.
Author photo.

Yolandi, detail. Author photo.

Elkins is currently making busts, like Yolandi, the Sea Witch, covered with barnacles. It's a life-size work—like all of hers,  fabulously detailed. The face is so life-like that I asked her if there's a model, and it seems that there is, though there was not a sitter. The face is based on images of a singer Elkins admires. "I was hoping to find a Muse," she explains, so she decided that being a fan was close enough. It seems to have worked, for even with all the fantastical elements—the crazed skin at the scalp line; the huge accretion of barnacles; the eyes without pupils—the face is almost disconcertingly easy to engage with. 

Most of the work in Elkins' show is black and white. It is not glazed because the weight of glazes would overpower and fill in the extreme delicacy of her manipulations. The stain she uses is pure pigment mixed with clay body, rubbed into the clay. Black is the color she has chosen, not a default.

Julie Elkins, The Factory. Porcelain and porcelain stain, acrylic
paint. Author photo.
Note the two mouths, left and right, beneath the surface.

When she uses color, though, the contrast heightens the inherent drama of the work. The Factory is an astonishing piece on every level, and the use of minutely painted graffiti on the walls of the abandoned industrial building underscores Elkins' ability to place high realism (the extreme, accurate detail) in an imagined, symbolic environment (a cut-away of the Earth, which speaks, being filled with the bones of the dead.) Her observations are so keen, so many, and so precisely rendered as to provide unusually secure grounding for the rest of the scene that she imaginatively posits. There is a conviction to her imagination that she really doesn't have to sell us; we are sold by her attention to the normal, the scenes that all of us see every day.

Mouth and bones in the earth beneath The Factory. 
Detail photo by the author.

Elkins is working in Key West, Florida, where she and her husband moved via a masted sixty-foot canoe when things went south for them in Richmond, Virginia. Their two-and-a-half month trip on the Intercoastal Waterway provided considerable grist for her imaginative mill, one that was already convinced about the reality of ghosts and metaphysical realities.

Julie Elkins, Strong Wind, Earth, and Sky. Porcelain and
porcelain stain. Author detail photo.

That habit of mind permeates Elkins' work, which, the busts excepted, is entirely depopulated. What she gives us are ruins, abandoned buildings, and these set in such a way that we are mindful of their connections to the earth—the collector of our bones and absorber or our detritus. So while she does not present us with figures in her scenes, the human presence is felt everywhere in her work. Lily who is not in her bedroom haunts the remaining space; as do the people who used to keep the factory working when we were an industrial country; or whoever occupies the lonely shack situated between Strong Wind, Earth, and Sky. 

Even with the suggestion that humans do not move alone on the planet—that trees have arms and the earth itself can speak—Elkins' fanciful world strikes me as a  place of comfort. Even through bleak scenes, spirits stir to suggest that wherever humans have been, heat and heart remain. It's certain that whatever Elkins puts her dedicated hand to is animated by just those qualities.

Julie Elkins, detail from Beasties. Porcelain and porcelain stain. Author photo.

Ceramist Joe Bova: Fully Formed Figures in Tacit Stories

I'd never heard of Joe Bova before I received the announcement for his show at the Sherrie Gallerie here in Columbus. Shows at Sherrie Hawk's gallery are always worth seeing because she has a fine eye, lots of information about her specialties—contemporary ceramics and jewelry—but, best of all, she is infinitely curious. Because Sherrie learns from every artist she brings into her space, I'm rewarded with great conversation whenever I drop by. Even when my first impression of a show leaves me cold, fifteen minutes of looking at it with Sherrie always gives me a solid understanding of the artist's motivations and process. I may leave the gallery with no more taste for the work than I came with, but I'm always filled with respect for the artist.

The crossing, detail

Joe Bova's work captivated me immediately, however. His ceramic sculptures that depict animal and human forms are life-like and refined, seemingly composed from clay only in the metaphorical sense that we all are. The textures he achieves are uncannily true. The skin of babies calls out for caresses. Frogs gleam with moisture. Ravens' wings have a low, waxy shine, but not so much to reveal them in the moonlight if they fly by night.

The infant dream of slumbering Dierdre

In general, I'm not a fan of art that painstakingly imitates reality, but Bova's captivates me because he so minutely describes protagonists of dramas that he otherwise hasn't written. Each piece implies a story that we will understand only by making it up. A baby sleeps with no apparent anxiety on the back of a raven. Is the raven outsized, or is the baby a tiny Thumbelina? Where are they going? Where have they landed? Has the baby been abducted? Is the baby being saved, or delivered?

Likewise, in a piece titled, "Emigration," a crowd/family/army/refugee band of frogs surrounds One set off in a circle of blue. To what end are they sailing on the boat? To deliver their King to a new place where they will found a colony? Are they escaping a war/persecution? Are their motions free or forced? And why are frogs going on a boat instead of in the water? Maybe they are enchanted humans. In such a manner, each of Bova's pieces suggests an unknown history that has delivered the situation we see. To what destination or destiny the characters will travel or drift remains unknown.

Emigrants

I find that when each sculpture lands us in whatever imaginary world we create from personal associations—fairy tales, folklore, myths, Bible stories, animal fables—the literalness of the sculpture lends substance to the otherwise fabulous story. The story emerges from the fog of enchantment. In my favorite, "Infant Voyager," for instance, I connect the image to the tale of baby Moses in the basket woven of bulrushes. In the story, Moses is discovered by a queen and comes into good fortune. But the suggestion of risk to a vulnerable, unwitting life disturbs me, and this clay image pulls that out. It also makes me think of infant exposure, and of the Viking practice of floating the elderly onto the ocean to die. None of these associations hang together in narrative, but all come together seamlessly in the reality of this work that embodies vulnerability, innocence, risk, birth and death in one experience.

Infant voyager

In a gallery talk at the show's opening, Bova explained that the work in the show at Sherrie Gallerie was all  made during his 2011 Fulbright Scholar year at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland. Used to around-the-clock studio access at home, he was flummoxed to find the College's studios closed on weekends and late nights. He spent time delving into Irish mythology, pre-Christian, and early Christian stories. The raven and baby refer to the tragic story of Deirdre; another work refers to the banishment of snakes from Ireland by St. Patrick. Knowledge of these stories will enhance works in a particular way for viewers familiar with them. Still, I felt nothing lost by my ignorance of them. That specificity of figure in the wide-open context produces fertile breeding ground for stories.

What I found more relevant to the work was finding that Bova spent a lot of his East Texas boyhood hunting and fishing; that his knowledge of animals was gained by skinning animals and learning them from the insides out. So, where he sculpted the tiniest figures by hand from solid pieces of clay (at his kitchen table, in lieu of studio tables at night), the larger forms like the dog and the bobcat, are hollow because he creates them by draping flat sheets of clay—by working with skins, as it were. His intimate knowledge of animal anatomy, surfaces, and volumes; his life-long observations of animals he's killed have suffused the clay ones with uncanny life, in action or relaxation.

Blue Serenity

"Blue Serenity" may emerge from Bova's childhood memories of days hunting with hound dogs and plying swamps on a pirogue. This dog is one of the larger, hollow figures that he created by draping clay; it's a resting, resurrected dog from the viewer's own memory or fantasy. There are colors of gray that breeders will tell you constitute "blue" in dogs, but this life-like dog is a color one will never see in nature. With one paw up, she seems to be relaxing, not dead. Why her color? Is the pirogue docked or floating? Like all of Bova's characters—babies, ravens, skulls, or snakes—dogs strike a deep, primal chord with most people. Our imaginations respond to them. The dog is a faithful and good character: What is her story?

Bova lives now in Santa Fe, New Mexico, retired after an international career of teaching, residencies, and engagements as guest artist around the world (see his website). My visit to his site was prompted less by desire for biographical details than for a look at his earlier work. Everything I found was very clearly from the same careful hand: the great attention to modeling details, the animal protagonists, the careful choices of glazes and finished textures. But his earlier work seems as closed as the current work is open.

In his posted statement, Bova said, "For much of my career I have been making social and political commentary art, often also involving eroticism. In 2003 I began work that was responsive to the misguided policies of my government. As the Republican senator from Missouri, Charles Schurz said in 1861, 'Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right, when wrong, to be put right,' I have been trying through my work to do my part." He continues to say that in 2006-07 he sought "respite from the polemical."

The current work appears to be the opposite of polemic. In polemic, the message is a statement, complete and self-contained. As a story, it has no development. The viewer may sympathize or not, agree or disagree with the program, but the point of such an attentive hand as Bova's—the result of the unarticulated human process beyond the political message—may well remain entirely overlooked.

There's no overlooking any detail of Bova's skilled hand now. There's no ignoring the generosity with which he applies mastery in the service of an extended art form. His new work is an ignition that fires the imaginations of his viewers. The closer we get, the better it works.

Survivor