BCA Fall Exhibitions 2020: Ceramic Installation Artist Focus Guide

Unprecedented?, BCA Center installation view, 2020

JEREMY AYERS, BRIELLE ROVITO, DAN SIEGEL, AND SARAH CAMILLE WILSON

A RTIST FOCU S

Dan Siegel (from left to right) Jar for screaming at the past, The present, Or into the future Jar for leftover bits of Ikea furniture, That you don’t want to throw out, They might come in handy someday Jar that can be used as a vase When you accidentally break the lid Jar for a questionably fermented kimchi, A different shape would have been better Jar for your last breaths, You are a new person now glazed stoneware, 2020 9.5 – 10" x 4.5" diameter inches $250 each

It feels like something quite profound is happening but also feels impossible to know what will come of it. Despite my tendency towards optimism, it feels pretty trying to keep asking how we’ve managed so well to not learn from our past.

- Dan Siegel

Dan Siegel (b. 1979, Manhasset, NY) explores form, line, and surface in his wheel-thrown and hand-built stoneware. For Unprecedented?, Siegel chose to title each vessel separately rather than as a series. Desiring to capture the subjectivity of what we place meaning in (especially concerning the objects we use) the artist created titles that move between seriousness and absurdity, function and philosophy.

In Unprecedented? four Burlington artists were commissioned to create an edition of five works that signify expressive states of containment, restraint, suppression, or isolation. While artists’ vessels could vary in scale, they would be unified by form, style, and response to theme.

The resulting ceramic containers are presented as an installation that can be viewed as a group or individually. Evenly spaced upon their respective shelf, each vessel suggests the physical and social distancing that has come to define our daily lives. Collectively, these vessels can symbolize the varied struggles and coping strategies we use when we experience stress, uncertainty, and trauma in our lives.

Brielle Rovito Matriarch Internalizing, Series of Five, 2020 slip-cast porcelain 11" x 4.5" diameter $425 each I think about containment alongside the concept of feeling trapped. Even if contained in familiar surroundings such as home, city, state, we are still not meant to stay so stationary in our being. Beyond our physical space, this time has forced us to be contained within ourselves, inside our bodies and minds and emotions.

During times where we can move freely and interact with people around us, we have the ability to exert what may deeply haunt us on the inside. We can talk and laugh and hug and cry to express what is otherwise held within the cells of our bodies. In this unprecedented time, we have had to face the cruel attempt of replicating this through screens and phone calls, while still longing for the physical hug or touch of a friend. In this way, we ourselves are contained within ourselves right now.

- Brielle Rovito

Brielle Macbeth Rovito (b. 1990, River Falls, WI) creates plaster and porcelain sculptures that often evoke curiosity and playfulness. For Matriarch Internalizing, Rovito re-imagines her traditional forms to visualize feelings of containment. Each vessel includes a pattern of small bulges pressing out from the surface – as if a force is trapped within and pushing outwards to escape. Eventually, this force is released and bursts through the delicate surface as seen in the vessel on the far right.

Jeremy Ayers Striped Urn, Series of Five, 2020 resist-glazed stoneware 9 x 7" diameter $300 each

This group of urns came directly from my time in quarantine. I had a custom order request for an urn from a friend whose wife’s parents had passed recently. I had made urns occasionally over the years, but this was the first chance I had to focus on creating my own take on this functional item. An urn has a specific function; it’s meant to hold cremains. I made these jars narrow at the opening, too narrow to reach a hand into, signifying that once ashes are put in, they will never be removed.

- Jeremy Ayers

Jeremy Ayers (b. 1974, Burlington, VT) strives to make functional pottery that celebrates life’s joys and rites of passage. In his series Striped Urn, Ayers merges function and aesthetics by employing bold lines, stark contrasts, and varied contours. The line of urns along the shelf summon feelings of grief, loss, and passage for individuals known and unknown to us who have died from Covid-19 among the more than 1.13 million deaths globally (as of Oct. 21, 2020). This ubiquitous vessel also summons early memories of the emerging pandemic, with scenes of stacked urns greeting lines of family members in Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the first outbreak. The Wuhan urns became a grim and potent revelation of the growing scale of fatalities due to the pandemic – as well as a cautionary tale for nations as they seek to control its alarming narrative.

Sarah Camille Wilson Waiting, Series of Five, 2020 stoneware 12 – 14" x 5" diameter $500 each As Agnes Martin (1912-2004) said, “Beauty is an awareness in the mind.” My pots aspire to encourage this awareness, both in the mind and in the hands.

The forms are simple and subtly imperfect. The marks that cover them suggest things beneath the surface that are neither visible nor understood. My work is concerned with beauty, but it is a quiet, uncertain beauty. I seek access to emotions and sensations that cannot be put into words.

- Sarah Camille Wilson

In Waiting, Sarah Camille Wilson (b. 1985, Durham, NC) creates lidded containers that are too tall and narrow to serve any practical function. Sparse and minimal in their design, these slender jars evoke the prolonged isolation so many have experienced since early March.

The global pandemic, with the social distancing and quarantine required to slow the virus, highlights our innate need for social contact within nearly every aspect of our lives. As the pandemic and required isolation endures, it reveals the fragility of our social, economic, and mental health support systems for our most vulnerable and at-risk populations.

Commentary

ceramic installation: Jeremy Ayers, Brielle Rovito, Dan Siegel, and Sarah Camille Wilson From a psychological perspective, any work of art can be understood as a container, organizing our perceptions. The recent resurgence of interest in the minimalist work of Agnes Martin, who lived her adult life with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, is perhaps a reflection of a national need to discern reality by focusing on simple truths. BCA’s exhibition Unprecedented? is a much needed local medicine for our chaotically overwhelmed minds. Ceramics provide a physical manifestation for art’s ability to contain. The works in this series offer a satisfying, solid, comfort that helps us organize our individual and communal perceptions. Most of these pieces satisfy us further as holding vessels. There is a physical experience of the mind being held as we perceive our relationship to these works. Even if our experience of them may be virtual, they exist in physical three dimensional reality.

This holding function comforts minds overwhelmed by daily life, threat of Covid, social injustice, human overpopulation, and our impingement on the natural world. Further, they soothe us with their physicality. The artists created them through touch, and in viewing them is an awareness that to touch them would provide a simple experience of smooth, solid, cool, warm. Dan Siegel’s series of jars brings this function to the foreground.

There is a time for solitude as we are reminded in Sarah Camille Wilson’s series titled, Waiting. We are prompted to come back into ourselves, find our minds and bodies, and metabolize our experiences. To remain contained, however, is to be trapped. Even the Striped Urn series by Jeremy Ayers, which functions to contain the ashes of death, becomes something else in time. As we rest in ourselves we are able to cultivate hope and strength, as we see expressed in Brielle Rivoto’s series, Matriarch Internalizing.

After a time, grounded now, we can each use our cultivated vital energy with what we are encountering in the world, much like the artistic process itself.

Made from the earth, these ceramics remind us to contain core elements of truth in the midst of what hopes to be destructive forces of creation. Energy and matter, core elements contained, and expanding. Let us remember that containers come in all sizes. Humans are containers (of what?). Our families are containers, our communities, our world, our infinitely interconnected universe.

Elizabeth Goldstein, PhD Clinical Psychologist, Burlington, VT

Biographies Jeremy Ayers (b. 1974, Burlington, VT) strives to make functional pottery that celebrates the joy of eating and drinking and creates a special relationship between the owner and the object. Ayers holds a BA in Fine Arts from The Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston. He is the owner of Jeremy Ayers Pottery, and 18 Elm in Waterbury. His work has been shown locally, nationally and is in collections internationally. His work has been featured in Ceramics Monthly, Bon Appetit, Sight Unseen and Design Sponge. He has exhibited at The Clay Studio, Philadelphia; The Bell Gallery, Providence; and the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston. Currently, he resides in Waterbury, Vermont.

Brielle Macbeth Rovito (b. 1990, River Falls, WI) is a sculptor from Baldwin, Wisconsin whose plaster and porcelain sculptures evoke curiosity and playfulness and invite the viewer to contemplate the present moment. Rovito holds a BA in Fine and Studio Arts from Northwestern College, Iowa. She is the co-founder and manager of The Form Collective and creator of Dust and Form in Burlington, Vermont. Her sculptures, often doubling as objects with practical function, have been in collaborations with Tata Harper, Domino Magazine, Better Homes and Gardens, and BOON_ROOM, Paris. She currently resides in Burlington, Vermont.

Dan Siegel (b. 1979, Manhasset, NY) specializes in wheel-thrown or hand build stoneware.

Siegel begins by translating his ideas to paper and then into three-dimensional clay objects, exploring form, line, and surface. His works can be found at Thirty-Odd and August First, both in Burlington, Vermont. His studio is located in the Old North End, Burlington, Vermont.

Sarah Camille Wilson (b. 1985, Durham, NC) has a BFA from Maine College of Art and an MFA from Syracuse University. For the past 15 years, she has taught ceramics classes in both university and community settings, and maintains an active studio practice. Sarah’s work in clay has taken her to China, India and around the US as both an artist in residence and a teacher, and she loves exploring new clays in new places. While most of her work begins on the wheel, it is through drawing and surface that she truly expresses the ideas in her work. She lives in Burlington, Vermont.

Dr. Elizabeth Goldstein is a Clinical Psychologist who specializes in anxiety, depression, and trauma psychotherapy, consultation, and supervision with Mansfield Psychotherapy Associates. Dr. Goldstein received her doctorate from the University of Maine. She completed her postdoctoral studies in disaster mental health and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at the National Center for PTSD, with subsequent positions as staff psychologist at the White River Junction Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center and the Colchester Community-based Outpatient Clinic, including Director of PTSD Services, and Director of Mental Health Services at Colchester CBOC. Dr. Goldstein has served as adjunct faculty at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth in New Hampshire, the University of Vermont, Burlington, and Antioch New England University in Keene, New Hampshire. She is Chair of the Vermont Association for Psychoanalytic Studies Applied Psychoanalysis Committee. She currently resides in Burlington, VT.

Participating Artists Jeremy Ayers, Becci Davis, Lillie Harris, Akiko Jackson, Brielle Rovito, EveNSteve (Eve and Steve Schaub), Dan Siegel, and Sarah Camille Wilson Community Contributors Tyeastia Green, Elizabeth Goldstein, Carmen Jackson, Milton Rosa-Ortiz, and Tamara Waraschinski

Unprecedented? is presented as part of 2020 Vision: Reflecting on a World-Changing Year, a statewide exhibition initiative of the Vermont Curators Group.

Burlington City Arts is supported by the New England Foundation for the Arts through the New England Arts Resilience Fund, part of the United States Regional Arts Resilience Fund, an initiative of the U.S. Regional Arts Organizations and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with major funding from the federal CARES Act from the National Endowment for the Arts.

2020 EXHIBITION YEAR PRESENTED BY

BCA Exhibitions are funded in part by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Vermont Arts Council.

BURLINGTON CITY ARTS 135 CHURCH STREET, BURLINGTON, VERMONT, 05401 BURLINGTONCITYARTS.ORG