Sculpture Space NYC- Center for Ceramic Art is pleased to present "A Theory of Everything: Odd Lot Ancestries" a ceramic installation by the artist Walter McConnell.
Walter McConnell "A Theory of Everything: Odd Lot Ancestries"
Sculpture Space NYC-Center for Ceramic Arts
October 25 – November 23, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, October 25
6:00pm – 8:00pm
Sculpture Space NYC- Center for Ceramic Art is pleased to present "A Theory of Everything: Odd Lot Ancestries" a ceramic installation by the artist Walter McConnell.
In this exhibition, McConnell will show a large installation with hundreds of ceramic figurines arranged in a pyramidal shape. Odd Lot Ancestry is the latest work in the artist’s series, A Theory of Everything, that began in 2002. These installations are complex undertaking and this will be the first time one of these works has been seen in the New York metropolitan area.
Walter McConnell earned his BFA from The University of Connecticut in 1974 and MFA in Ceramic Art from Alfred University in 1986. Well known for his installations of moist clay and towering assemblages of cast porcelain, he is the recipient of numerous grants awarded by; The Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, The New York Foundation for the Arts and The Constance Saltonstall Foundation. His installation work has been exhibited widely at: The Freer-Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian; the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore MD; The American University Art Museum Washington DC; The Denver Art Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art and at MASS MoCA in North Adams MA and internationally at the 10th Korean Ceramic Biennale, the Henan Museum in Zhengzhou China and The Benyamini Contemporary Ceramic Center in Tel Aviv, Israel and The European Cultural Center in Venice. Reviews of McConnell’s work have appeared in Sculpture Magazine, World Sculpture News, The New Art Examiner, Ceramics: Art and Perception, The New York Times and Ceramics Monthly. Walter McConnell is currently Professor Emeritus in the Division of Ceramic Art at Alfred University.
Sculpture Space NYC- Center for Ceramic Art is a non-profit 501(3) (C) dedicated to promoting contemporary visual art focusing on the research and exploration of three -dimensional work with an emphasis towards ceramics. SSNYC-CCA‘s mission is to stimulate creativity, new ideas and collaboration in ceramics-based investigations. Artists, designers and craftspeople.
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday: 2pm-8pm (appointment is not required)
our@sculpturespacenyc.com
We are located at 47-21 35th Street, Long Island City NY 11101, near the 33rd Street/ Rawson Street stop on the 7 train.
Essay by Sequoia Miller
Odd Lot Ancestry, Walter McConnell
Walter McConnell’s Odd Lot Ancestry is a monumental, tiered mound comprised of hundreds of ceramic figurines interspersed with vessels and architectural elements.
Aglow with mirror-like lustered surfaces and protected by four guardian figures at its perimeter, the work radiates a golden iridescence, bathing us in light. What is the nature of enlightenment? How can everyday objects become pathways to the divine? How does the persistence of ceramics contribute to our understanding of ourselves as individuals and a society?
McConnell’s work presses upon these and other questions through its coupling of the sacred and profane. Representations of the Virgin Mary, Kuan Yin, and Beethoven sit alongside innumerable gnomes, dolls, and stock characters from the debris of various figurative traditions. In the centre of the composition, somewhat larger than most other components, stands a self-portrait of the artist as everyman, created from a digital scan of his own body. McConnell makes the majority of his figures using molds designed for hobby ceramics, often ones that have been abandoned. These sentimental, kitschy forms stand in for a vast array of cultural tropes and stereotypes, while also building on millennia-old traditions of small-scale representation of the human form, including ancient Greek tanagra, Chinese Dehua porcelain buddhas, Staffordshire pew groups, and others. Many of these figurines had ritual or ceremonial functions, while more recently they have tended toward sentimental and nostalgic popular narratives. Bringing these varied traditions together, and in such majestic form, McConnell points to the ways in which ceramics continually aggregate layers of meaning, adding new references that never fully dissolve what came before.
Imbricated among the hobbyist elements are figures created from the artist’s digital scans. For many years McConnell has created full-body scans not just of himself but also of family members, former students, and others from which he has generated glitchy ceramic figures. The process extends the cultural tropes of hobbyist figurines to the people in McConnell’s community, while preserving their anonymity. The artist also draws from museum collections, scanning historical figurines from institutions in the United States and China. These distorted versions of historical forms bring into consideration the source material of the later, commoditized hobbyist versions.
Odd Lot Ancestry is the latest work in the artist’s series, A Theory of Everything, begun in 2002. The work’s title refers not just to the abandoned molds used by the artist, but also acknowledges that many elements of this artwork were figurines rejected from earlier projects. Simply refiring them with the lustrous, reflective glaze becomes an act of reclamation, altering and elevating their meaning.
These figurines, regardless of their sources, take on new meanings in the aggregate and with their mirrored, varied surfaces. Collectively, they speak to the human impulse to see the world through our own image, while suggesting a spiritual dimension that connects us both to each other and to our ancestors—real, imagined, and archetypal.
Arrayed in a pyramidal form evoking a stupa, a traditional Buddhist temple shape, the mass fills our field of vision while reaching upward toward the heavens. The reflective lustre glazes, a type first invented in Syria around the 9th century, signal both divine illumination as well as late-stage capitalism’s oversaturation of luxury and the flattening that follows (think gold-plated escalator). Through the unified surface, McConnell elides the specific ceramic histories embedded in the forms, instead focusing on the ways in which ceramic figurines have functioned socially rather than art historically, bringing meaning into people’s lives.
Odd Lot Ancestry’s cacophony of figures, extravagant surfaces, and sacred structure rise toward a nobility of spirit despite, or perhaps because of, the destabilized value systems of high and low, quotidian and holy. Ultimately, as viewers we invest this artwork with our own meanings, reveling in its visual excess and recognizing hints at long-held cultural memories.
Sequoia Miller is chief curator and deputy director at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art in Toronto, Canada