CONTAINED EXCITEMENT: PLEASURES OF THE VOID

CONTAINED EXCITEMENT: PLEASURES OF THE VOID DECEMBER 11, 2010 – JANUARY 22, 2011

EXHIBITION DECEMBER 11, 2010 – JANUARY 22, 2011

Cover image: Debora Muhl, Layers of Rhythm II, sweet grass, waxed linen, rayon ribbons, gourd, beads, branch, 11 x 112 x 11 inches

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Contained Excitement: Pleasures of the Void Text by Randall Morris Catalog Design & Photographs by Jurate Veceraite © 2011 Cavin-Morris Gallery ARTNET MAGAZINE REVIEW JAN 2011 http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/karlins/contained-excitement-at-cavin-morris1-5-11.asp Reproduction of any text, illustration, in whole or in part is forbidden, without the publisher’s prior written permission.

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Akiko Tanaka, Oju Box, 2010, high fire porcelain, glass, gold luster, 3.5 x 3.5 x 8 in

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CONTAINED EXCITEMENT: PLEASURES OF THE VOID

By Randall Morris Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to present a cross-cultural, multi-genre exhibition of magical and/or visionary objects called Contained Excitement: Pleasures of the Void. The show concentrates on the way the artist controls the sensual expectations of space in an object, which may or may not take leave of its utilitarian purpose. It is more than an attractive shape; it transgresses against expectations. The void is never really empty; it can contain mysterious objects or it can be the Mystery itself. In this observation is a secret of the soul of sensuality itself; the strategic withholding or timing of information in order to charge something with energy. Revelation is the artist’s slave. Contained Excitement: Pleasures of the Void is about the compression of information by manipulation of negative space. It is a much about the process of making work as it is about the end result. A tea bowl is clay and fire but it is the space within it that holds the spiritual essence of the ceremonial tea. Seemingly simple, hardly Western, but there if you want it to be and there even if you don't; the artist has the ability to shape a seeming void into a complex package of meaning from the native power object to the academy's mandate of intellectual conceptualism.

Anyone who has been to a ryokan or country-style inn in Japan knows the feeling of sensual awareness when simplicity is done perfectly and becomes luxurious. When cleanliness brings you closer to the essence of air and wind, when a temple space is transformed by smoky incense made from rare or cherished ingredients that never totally leave your memory. Such is what happens when the artist's hands, heart and mind transform space. There is a synaesthesia that goes with the territory, an intangible shape shifting; spiritual can be erotic and erotic can be spiritual; emptiness can connect one directly with the crowded universe; silence becomes the white noise of existence. The challenge was to find a premise that didn't define anything, that made nothing finite but instead opened possibility after possibility. We wanted a show we could do again and again that would never be remotely the same twice. It was our way of collaborating with the artists.

This exhibition also ushers in our deepening fascination as a gallery with the nexus points of Art and Design when craft is the tool of process that submits to more conceptual ideas. We mix Art Brut, ancient and contemporary ceramics, New Basketry, and other media to introduce a

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new group of artists to the gallery, but the central focus is that Power object which moves within and beyond intellect.

We sought to make this exhibition suggest the enormous range of possibilities from ancestral secrets to sexual excitation to manipulation of cosmic propensities. It was inevitable that the more we played with the idea of agitated spatial possibilities the wider the choices and possibilities became.

The list of what we first imagined was twice as large as what we included; high-end blown glass bongs, pre-Columbian and Chinese mortuary urns, a fourteen by ten foot bamboo raft by Sopheap Pich, Healing Machines by Emery Blagdon, the genius hobo healer of Nebraska (the only reason we couldn't was they were all in an exhibition in Germany), numerous American and Japanese ceramists, divination books from Zaire and Liberia and Angola, as well as Kongo and Bamana figures with secret ingredients in their stomach cavities, samurai helmets, and on and on, all having to do with the way that artists manipulate energy and charge voids and then build a physical framework around the space in order to exhibit or contain it. We already have ideas for the next installment of this show next year.

We did include the transformation of Native American Sweetgrass into deconstructions of molecular perfection in Debora Muhl’s work; the nervous and dark recycling in the forms made

by Jerry Bleem and John Garret; the beckoning toward controlled form and consequent revelation in Susan kavecky, and the prescient caress of the present encapsulated in the past in the poetics of Lissa Hunter; the brooding presence in the lithops-like ceramic sculptures of Kenji Gomi; the Zen poems inscribed in the 19th century ceramics of the Buddhist nun Rengetsu; hidden books of healing and magic from the tribal peoples in Southern China; the incredible repression and resultant freedom in the ceramics boxes of Shuji Ikeda where the clay is woven like bamboo; the opening of soul to the elements of wind and light in the sweeping bamboo constructions of Charissa Brock met by the dark compression of clay into Place and Mortality in the ceramics of Tim Rowan; the erotic beckoning of release through restraint and role-play in the bondage bed made by Sullivan Walsh; the repressed corset-like baskets of JoAnne Russo; and the ancient feminism brought larger than life into the now of the ceramics of Avital Sheffer. A special inclusion is an installation of the cold beautiful interiors of a group of twelve Choson-period tea bowls from Korea, and two intricate and rare woven rattan shields from early Kongo. The

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untouchable ephemera of Kabalistic being is intimated and teased in David Chaim Smith's startling graphite three-part drawing where one has the feeling of seeing something never shown, never drawn before. Kevin Sampson compresses the African American yard show into a basket-like sculpture, loud in its colors and far-reaching in its cultural implications.

Emogayu's porcelains tease light and shadow with their organic playfulness. The New Baskets of Lizzie Farey, inexplicably contain a sense of Scottish place, evocative of a poetry of landscape.

The fragility of Deirdre Hawthorne’s cups belies the strength of their reach, to hold one is to hold a fluttering bird. Mei-Ling Hom's ceramic shapes are closed but they have a divinatory affect and movement like Boli objects form Mali; Kentaro Kawabata's anti-porcelain is an object form alchemical practice in a parallel universe, while the clean twisted violence of Shozo Michikawa's ceramics and the subtle but firm violence of Polly Sutton's baskets resonate together. Jill Bonovitz's wire wall sculpture mostly disappears yet it holds its place with firm intention. The stack of earthenware-inverted cups in Drew Nicklas' bowl has no immediate reason to be as mysterious as it is yet it just as satisfying as the Korean and Rengetsu ceramics around it. Hyungsub Shin's obsessive huge ear of Indian corn is so tight it seems about to explode from inside while Akiko Tanaka's small boxes are intimate and invite you closer, to touch, to spend time, to open them and unleash the unknown. Tyrome Tripoli puts glass in bondage, actually blowing the glass into the iron restraints that contain it. There are other artists just as important, whose work like those above would take so much more than these few headlines to describe. Among them are Takao Okazaki, Jiro Yonezawa, Yoshitaka Hasu, Hisako Sekijima, Nancy Moore Bess, Jennifer Falck Linssen, and Dorothy Gill Barnes (Browngrotta artists), and Polly Jacobs Giacchina, and Gerri Johnson-McMillin.

Space is dangerous and combustible. It has sound. It can be vulnerable or impervious. It can be vast wastes or intimate home. It is magic and the profane and the scientific and the mundane.

We wanted as broad a variety of tastes as we could conjure up with a curated connection. This was it, this time around.

Randall Morris 1/1/11

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Charissa Brock, Untitled, 2010, Black bamboo, waxed linen thread, bent and sewn bamboo, 28 x 26 x 30 in

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Charissa Brock, Nautilos, 2007, Black bamboo, waxed linen thread, bent and sewn bamboo, 17.5 x 17.5 x 17.5 in

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Emogayu, Tension 55, 2010, English porcelain with glaze, 9 x 9.5 x 9.5 in

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Emogayu, Volcano 63, 2008, Kyoto Porcelain, 8.75 x 9 x 9 in

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Gerri Johnson-McMillin, 302, 2001, Fishbone, clear monofilament, glass beads, 3 x 3 x 7 in

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Gerri Johnson-McMillin, Champagne Caviar, 2010, Fishbone, champagne monofilament, crocheted mono, gold beads, 9 x 9 x 4 in

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Jerry Bleem, Crest, 2004, fish scales, staples, 13.75 x 16.75 x 8.5 in

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Jerry Bleem, Top: Compress, 2001, screen, staples, 8.5 x 7.5 x 6.25 in Bottom: Lean, 1998, Screen, staples, 12.25 x 14 x 8.25 in

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Avital Sheffer, Inannah V, 2009, Handbuilt earthenware, 26.77 x 12.99 x 7.09 in

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Avital Sheffer, Adamah IV, 2010, Handbuilt earthenware, 26.77 x 21.65 x 10.63 in

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Avital Sheffer, Mother-Tongue II, 2010, Handbuilt earthenware, 24.02 x 21.65 x 9.45 in

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China, Pair of Nuosu bimo's (priest's) leather manuscripts in double-pocketed cloth pouch, Sichuan, Province, China, c. 1900, leather, bamboo, 22 x 8 x 3.5 in

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Lissa Hunter, Stonestack, 2009, Waxed linen thread, paper cord, paper, paint, pencil, fiberboard, plaster, stones, 22 x 24 x 2 in

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Lissa Hunter, Fade to Black, 2004, Waxed linen thread, paper cord, paper, paint, pencil, fiberboard, plaster, 27 x 8 x 4 in

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Lissa Hunter, The Conversation, 2006 Waxed linen thread, paper cord, paper, paint, pencil, fiberboard, and plaster, 12 x 18 x 4 in

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Sullivan Walsh, Sleigh Bed, Hot Rolled Steel, 64 x 102 x 54.75 in

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Shozo Michikawa, Tanka Triangle Pot with white line, Stoneware, 6 x 5 x 7 in

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Tim Rowan Left: Untitled, 2008, Woodfired Ceramic, 14 x 12 x 14 in; Right from top to bottom: Untitled, 2008, Woodfired Ceramic, 16 x 11 x 4 in; Untitled, 2009, Woodfired Ceramic, 8 x 6 x 5.5 in Untitled, 2009, Woodfired Ceramic, 7 x 6.5 x 5 in

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Tyrome Tripoli, Sargasso Green Selenium, 2004, Blown glass, flat bar steel, 25 x 11.5 x 10 in

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Akiko Tanaka, Birth, 2008, fired ceramic, wire, 26 x 24 x 12

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Africa, Ngbundu Shield, Congo (DRC), Congo-Brazzaville, Central African Republic, c.1930-40's, Woven plaited plant fibers, 54 x 18 x 3.5 in

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Africa, Ngbundu Shield, Congo (DRC), Congo-Brazzaville, Central African Republic, c.1930-40's, Woven plaited plant fibers, 51 x 17.75 x 3.5 in

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Kenji Gomi, Untitled, 2010, Saiki ceramic, 12 x 9 x 20 in

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Kentaro Kawabata, Toll Vase "Roco", 2008, Porcelain and glass, 21.25 x 7 x 7 in

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JoAnne Russo, Revealed, 2006, Black ash, beads, hooks, eyes, wire, waxed linen, 27.5 x 11 x 11 in

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JoAnne Russo, Collar, 2005, Black ash, beads, hooks, eyes, 27 x 16 x 16 in

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Polly Adams Sutton, Grazie, 2009, Cedar bark, cane, wire woven and twined, 14 x 13 x 10 in

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Hisako Sekijima, A Hole to See -II, 2006, black bamboo, 6 x 18.5 x 14.125

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Masako Yoshida, Divided #325, 2003, Walnut and maple bark, 7 x 7 x 7 in

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Dorothy Gill Barnes, White Pine Dendroglyph, 1995-1999, white pine, 14.75 x 9 x 9 in

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Susan kavicky, Solar Wind, Black ash, illustration board, acrylic paint and rattan, 15 x 21 x 16 in

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Shuji Ikeda, Tall Red & Black Tsuchikago (woven ceramic basket), 2010, red & black clay wedged together (nerikomi), electric fired, cone 6, glazed inside for water tightness for cut flower arrangement, 6.5 x 6.5 x 18 in

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John Garrett, New Age Basket No.7, 2010, Steel and copper sheet, steel, copper, brass wire, circuit board material, paper, saw blade, bullet riddled steel, crocheted copper wire, wire, fencing, 15.5 x 15.5 x 15.5 in

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John Garrett, I and Thou, 2003, Hardware cloth, copper, wire, beads, 11 x 11 x 11 in (each cube)

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Mutsumi Iwasaki, Invite the Wind, Ramie paperstring, persimmon tannin twining, 16 x 9 x 6 in

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Debora Muhl, Cathedral, 2008, Sweet grass, waxed linen, rayon ribbons, 20 x 17 x 15 in

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Africa, Ndau Beer Pot, Mid-20th Century, Bark Fiber Woven, Clay, 17 x 17 x 19 in

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Polly Jacobs Giacchina, Unraveling Terrain, Date palm, acrylic painted canvas, weave caning, 29 x 34 x 5 in

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Polly Jacobs Giacchina, Distant Ridges, Date palm, steel cable, 21 x 34 x 6 in

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Kevin Sampson, Fourth of July, 2001, Mixed Media, 11.25 x 8 x 8 in

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Jill Bonovitz, Wire Vessel, painted wire, fabric, 24 x 24 x 9 in

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Hyungsub Shin, Popped, 2010, Mixed Media, 46 x 10 x 8 in

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Jiro Yonezawa, Bridge Series, Shin (#78), 2007, bamboo, cedar root, urushi lacquer, 10.5 x 37 x 4.25 in

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Jiro Yonezawa, Armor, 1999, bamboo, cane, ash, cedar root, wood, steel, urushi lacquer, 19 x 22 x 10 in

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Top Nancy Moore Bess, Pebbles in a Stream, 2005-2006, cane, bamboo, waxed cotton, linen, acrylic, 7 x 43 x 8 in Bottom Mei-Ling Hom, Set, Untitled (Cloud), 2009, ceramic

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Lizzie Farey, Almost Spring, Willow, 15 x 15 x 8

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Lizzie Farey, Deep Joy, Willow, 10 x 10 x 35 in

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Nancy Moore Bess, Jakago I, dyed kiln dried Japanese bamboo, waxed linen, 7.5 x 4 x 4 in

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Hisako Sekijima, Structural Volume VI, walnut, akebia, 19 x 12 x 8 in

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John Garrett, Wind/Wind, 2005, Steel, copper and brass wire, electric cord, cable ties, fabric, raffia, beads, buttons, shell, 36 x 12 x 12 in

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Jennifer Falck Linssen, Katagami-style handcarved paper sculpture with stitching, 2010, archival cotton paper, aluminum, coated copper wire, waxed linen, stainless steel, paint, varnish, 27 x 8 x 5.5 in

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Mihara Ken, Small Sekki Plate, 2010, zumo ware, 7.5 x 7.5 x 1.25 in

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Kay Sekimachi, FB1008, 2008, natural and unspun flax, acrylic paint, matte medium, 4.5 x 8 x 8 in

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Kay Sekimachi, FB908, 2008, natural and unspun flax, gel medium, matte medium, 6.5 x 5.5 x 5.5 in

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Otagaki Rengetsu, Sencha cups, pair, 19th Century, (1791-1875), Glazed Ceramic, 4.5 x 4.5 x 2 in

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Otagaki Rengetsu, Dozara, set of ten, 19th Century (dated 1871), Glazed ceramic, 3.5 x 3.5 x .75 in Dozara, set of five, 19th Century (dated 1871), Glazed ceramic, 4.75 x 4.75 x .5 in

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Akiko Tanaka, Oju Box, 2010, high fired porcelain, glass, gold luster, 2.5 x 2.5 x 4 in

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Akiko Tanaka, Oju Box, 2010, high fired porcelain, glass, gold luster, 2.5 x 2.5 x 6 in

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Akiko Tanaka, Oju Box, 2010, high-fired porcelain, glass, gold luster, 3.5 x 3.5 x 9 in

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Shozo Michikawa, Kohiki Mizusashi, Stoneware with shino glaize, 6 x 6 x 6 in

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Shozo Michikawa, Shino Teabowl, Stoneware with kohiki glaze, 4 x 4.5 x 4 in

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Deirdre Hawthorne, Out of the Sun V, Saggar fired porcelain

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Deirdre Hawthorne, Out of the Sun III, 2010, Saggar fired porcelain, 4 x 3.5 x 3.75 in

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Deirdre Hawthorne, Out of the Sun I, Saggar fired porcelain, 4.5 x 4.25 x 4 in

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Hasu Yoshitaka, Incense Burner, (Ga) Iron glazed wood fired ceramic, 6 x 6.5 x 5 in

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Tomoko Kawakami, Flower Vessel, 2010, Fired Ceramic, 8 x 14 x 10.5 in

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Tim Rowan, Untitled, 2008, Wood-fired Ceramic, 15 x 15 x 15 in

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Tim Rowan, Untitled, 2008, Wood-fired Ceramic, 10.5 x 6.75 x 6.5 in

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Tim Rowan, Untitled, 2005, Wood-fired ceramic, 8 x 6 x 7 in

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Tim Rowan, Untitled, 2007, Wood-fired Ceramic, 17 x 23 x 17 in

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Tim Rowan, Box, 2008, Wood-fired Ceramic, 20.5 x 11.5 x 11 in

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China, Saggar with fired bowls, Song Dynasty (960-1127 AD), Saggar, porcelain, 7.5 x 7.5 x 3.5 in

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China, Saggar with fired bowls, Song Dynasty (960-1127 AD), Saggar, porcelain, 5.5 x 6 x 4 in

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China, Saggar with fired bowls, Song Dynasty (960-1127 AD), Saggar, porcelain, 8 x 8 x 5 in

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Emogayu, Tension 22, 2010, Kohiki clay, petrol and lichen glaze, 5 x 5 x 5 in

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Jill Bonovitz, Porcelain Bowl, 2008, Porcelain Glaze, 7 x 7 x 3 in

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Tim Rowan, Spiked Vessel, 2005, Woodfired Ceramic, 3.75 x 4 x 5 in

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David Chaim Smith, Diaphanous Reflections of the Streams and Drops (4 sequential panels), 2009, Pencil and ink on paper, 9 x 13 in

Diaphanous Reflections of the Streams and Drops (detail of two panels)

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China, Nuosu bimo's (priest's) leather manuscript, Sichuan Province, China, c.1900, leather, bamboo, 9.5 x 2 x 2 in

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Tim Rowan, Untitled, 2008, Wood-fired ceramics, 9 x 7 x 9 in

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Charissa Brock, Untitled Spiral, 2010, Black bamboo, waxed linen thread, bent and sewn bamboo, 35 x 35 x 26 in

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Korean Ceramics Top row from left to right: Blue Monk's Bowl, C. Early Chosun Period (15th Century), Fine Porcelain, Blue Celadon Glaze, 7.5 x 4.25 in; Crackle Tea Bowl, Early Chosun Period, 5.5 x 3.75 in: Punchon Tea Caddy, Early Chosun Period, White Porcelain, 4.25 x 5.25 in; Jade Green Punch Ong Bowl, C. Early Chosun Period (15-16th Century), Course Stoneware, 7 x 3 in; Middle row from left to right: Tea Bowl, Late Chosun Period (19th Century), Porcelain, Blue Celadon, 5.5 x 3 in; Large Bowl, Early Chosun Period, 7 x 3 in; Finely Potted Tea Bowl (with small gold repair), C. Early Chosun Period (16th Century), Gray/ White Porcelain (with gold repair), 6.5 x 2.5 in; Bottom row from left to right: Summer Tea Bowl, C. Mid-Chosun Period (17-18th Century), Porcelain, 6.5 x 2.25 in; Pack-Koryo White Tea Bowl, C. Koryo Period (11th Century), White Porcelain, Blue/Green, Celadon Glaze, 6 x 2.25 in; Medium Celadon Bowl, Mid Chosun Period, 6.5 x 4 in.

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