ASHWINI BHAT: ORIGIN OF SPECIES by Lucy Lacoste Gallery

ASHWINI BHAT: ORIGIN OF SPECIES

April 6 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 27, 2019

Opening Reception: April 6, 3-5pm Artist Talk: April 7, 2pm

25 Main St. Concord, MA | 978 369 0278 | info@lacostekeane.com 1

EXHIBITION STATEMENT This body of work, comprised of five serial sequencesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Origin of Species; Alive; The Beginning Is the End; Ghost Print and Garden of Earthy Delightsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; provokes reconsiderations of our assumptions about human nature. Although the animal kingdom arose from single-celled ancestors through an evolutionary surge of genetic material, more than fifty percent of our genome, the human genome, is shared with very first animal. Many contemporary conflicts derive from distinctions we insist exist between races, between animals and humans, and between ourselves and others competing for the same resources, but the genetic pool emphasizes our relatedness, how much we have in common, blowfish and ballerinas, gila monsters and gurus. The show introduces radical but somehow familiar forms that ask us to re-examine Western assumptions about species hierarchy. We encounter a bestiary in which traces of the human and traces of the animal linger in imagined bodies on the brink of being born. In order to explore the deep relationship between the human and non-human, between the constructed and the inherent, I continue to expand my technical approaches to surface, shape, and composition. After firing, I cold-finish sculptures using an array of techniques including spray-painting, glass and garnet amalgamation, and sandblasting in order to build out layers, to accentuate the complex connection between the sculptures and the body in transition between recognizable incarnations. The work, begun in long-term reflections on the interdependency of species, incorporates earthy material that is fired and subjected to various post-firing processes. The exhibition integrates my sense of our current environmental exigency, recent genetic science asserting the relatedness of earthly life, and a philosophical and ethical concern for the implications of our conjunction and commonality. 2

THE LIVING CLAY

Essay by Glenn Adamson; writer, curator and Yale scholar

A few years ago, Ashwini Bhat was at a residency in Appomattox, Virginia – the place where the Civil War ended. The place had a strangely apocalyptic feeling. Rain poured from the sky. She had no cell phone service. And when she waded out into the muck to dig up clay, she was attacked by mud dauber wasps (“they are interested in the same material I am,” she thought). Actually, she was very happy there. She was close, so very close, to nature. Bhat gathered things on her wet walks, filling up her jacket pockets and accumulating interesting piles on the corner of her worktable. When the wasps’ nests fell from the trees, abandoned by their former residents, she would fire them in the kiln. She found chunks of feldspar and other constituent materials of her ceramics and fused them into her sculptures. These works seemed mineral, animal and vegetable all at once. Bhat is an unusually articulate narrator of her own journey as a sculptor. She can pick out the multiple currents of her biography, and describe how they have all flowed together: her upbringing near Kerala, in west India, where she trained in the traditional dance form of bharatanatyam; her initial training in ceramics with the American expatriate Ray Meeker, in Pondicherry, on the far side of the subcontinent; her time in Japan, living in the cultural capital of Kyoto; and the important role played in her creative life by her partner Forrest, who is a poet and geologist (an ideal love match for a potter!). It was this romantic relationship that drew her to California, where she currently lives and works: “he chose Petaluma, and I chose him.” Bhat has absorbed the local materials and history there with her customary omnivorousness, seeking out new clays and firing processes, and learning about the defining figures of west coast ceramic history, such as Robert Arneson, John Mason, Ron Nagle, and Peter Voulkos: “heroes you are free to worship, she says, “partly because you will never make that kind of work.” 3

GARDEN OF EARTHY DELIGHTS

Garden of Earthy Delights is affectingly lumpen, and draws on Funk ceramics by Arneson and his followers. These works extend Bhat’s insight in Appomattox, that she could include raw material in her compositions, using it as a visual anchor. The mineral palette of the works recalls an experience that Bhat had hiking down into the Grand Canyon, in which she saw the browns, reds and yellows of her discipline arrayed in stratigraphic layers: “Every material I use in my work - it was like being in the belly of the beast. And it all happens because of a trickle of water through the rocks. Think of that!”

Ashwini Bhat Garden of Earthy Delights 2.0, 2018 Porcelain, wild clay, granite and sandstone 7h x 6w x 2d in

“This image, of descending into mother earth, seems to capture something essential about Bhat’s sculpture. She aims to connect with color, texture and materiality in a completely unmediated way, and then to stage that encounter for the viewer.”

Ashwini Bhat Garden of Earthy Delights 4.0, 2018 Fired clay with feldspar and natural ash 5h x 5w x 3 1/2d in

“In some ways that is a familiar idea. Traditional potters in Japan sometimes even talk about the “taste of the clay” (tsuchi aji), meaning not just how it feels in one’s mouth, when drinking from a teabowl, say, but its character, what it seems to want.”

Ashwini Bhat Garden of Earthy Delights 3.0, 2016 Fired clay with feldspar and natural ash 5h x 7 1/2w x 2 1/2d in

Ashwini Bhat Garden of Earthy Delights 7.0, 2018 Fired clay with garnet, schist, sandstone and glaze 5 1/2h x 6 3/4w x 2 1/2d in

Ashwini Bhat Garden of Earthy Delights 6.0, 2018 Fired clay with mud dauber nest, metal and glaze 7h x 5w x 2 4/5d in

Ashwini Bhat Garden of Earthy Delights 5.0, 2018 Fired clay with garnet, schist, sandstone and glaze 7h x 5w x 2 4/5d in

“Bhat is no traditionalist – one look at her work tells you that she is actively in dialogue with the latest currents in contemporary art. But she has deep respect for her material. Clay does indeed come alive in her work, and it has much to show us – if we are ready to see it.”

Ashwini Bhat Garden of Earthy Delights 1.0, 2018 Fired clay with granite, mud dauber nest and natural ash 6 1/2h x 12w x 2 1/2d in

ORIGIN OF SPECIES Origin of Species is Bhat’s most creaturely series, a set of abstracted figures standing upright with protuberances suggestive of feet, ears, and antlers. They communicate strong presence with remarkable economy of means, telegraphing the idea of primordial ur-creatures, prior to evolutionary genetic lineages, and the divergence between humans and other beings. In addition, because they so reductive in their palette and shape, these works give the viewer a chance to appreciate the rich textures of Bhat’s work – though they lack the strong polychrome of some of her other work, they are nonetheless richly colored. These are achieved over several firings (in both wood-fueled and electric kilns), with occasional doses of sandblasting or other alteration.

Ashwini Bhat Origin of Species 1.0, 2018 Fired and painted clay with natural ash 21 1/2h x 9w x 10d in

Ashwini Bhat Origin of Species 2.0, 2018 Fired and painted clay with glaze 21h x 13 1/2w x 14 1/2d in

Ashwini Bhat Origin of Species 3.0, 2018 Fired and painted clay with glaze 22h x 9w x 7d in

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Despite the attention she lavishes

on these surfaces, they have an intuitive, even strangely inevitable air about them, as if they were (as the title implies) evolved through purely natural selection.â&#x20AC;?

ALIVE SERIES Bhat thinks of her various series as in continuum with one another, as different facets of a single project. Even so, each has its own identifiable idiom. Most recently Bhat has developed a new series, titled simply Alive. It’s not difficult to see Bhat’s background in dance in these works, the way that a performer constantly shapes her own internal shapes in space (“from the head to the outstretched fingers, through the armpit – the armpit is super important”).

Ashwini Bhat Alive 1.0, 2018 Fi red a nd p a i nted c l a y 6h x 12w x 4d in

“Though not explicitly figural, these objects have a potent animate quality – one can almost imagine them breathing. They curl into themselves, folding like soft bellies, or arch upwards like yoga practitioners into taut curves.”

Ashwini Bhat Alive 5.0, 2018 Fired and Painted Clay 6 1/2h x 10w x 5d in

Ashwini Bhat Alive 3.0, 2018 Fired clay with natural ash glaze 4h x 12w x 3 1/2d in

Ashwini Bhat Alive 4.0, 2018 Fired and Painted Clay 8 1/2h x 7w x 2 1/2d in

Ashwini Bhat Alive 2.0, 2018 Fired and painted clay 4h x 12w x 3d in

THE BEGINNING IS THE END Bhat continues to work in other, more long-established idioms as well. The Beginning is the End consists of snarled coils of clay, arranged in densely knotted configurations. The stately-seeming title is actually descriptive, referring to the sculpturesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; internal continuity, the way their forms chase themselves around and around in endless loops, like baroque MĂśbius Strips. Bhat emphasizes this visual chase by giving the serpentine forms a defined, chamfered profile. This is truly drawing in three dimensions.

Ashwini Bhat Beginning is the End 1.0, 2018 Fired and painted clay, with glass and garnet media and glaze 8-10 in diameter

Ashwini Bhat Beginning is the End 3.0, 2018 Fired and painted clay, with glass and garnet media and glaze 8-10 in diameter

Ashwini Bhat Beginning is the End 5.0, 2018 Fired and painted clay, with glass and garnet media and glaze 8-10 in diameter

Ashwini Bhat Beginning is the End 6.0, 2018 Fired and painted clay, with glass and garnet media and glaze 8-10 in diameter

Ashwini Bhat Beginning is the End 2.0, 2018 Fired and painted clay, with glass and garnet media and glaze 8-10 in diameter

Ashwini Bhat Beginning is the End 4.0, 2018 Fired and painted clay, with glass and garnet media and glaze 8-10 in diameter

Ashwini Bhat Beginning is the End 7.0, 2018 Fired and painted clay, with glass and garnet media and glaze 8-10 in diameter

GHOST PRINT While you can see flashes of historical precedent in her oeuvre – not just the swaggering protagonists of the California clay revolution, but also the quieter pots of the Japanese tea ceremony tradition, and a fistful of abstract sculptors ranging from Brancusi to Benglis – Bhat is clearly establishing herself as a new voice in ceramics. It is a voice that sings in several registers. She divides her work into five distinct series, three of which are entitled The Beginning is the End, Garden of Earthly Delights, Origin of Species, and Ghost Print. These titles seem to chart a cosmological history in miniature, from the Biblical (“in the beginning was the Word…”) to the humanist turn of the Renaissance, embodied in Hieronymus Bosch’s famous painting, to the paradigm-shifting insights of Charles Darwin. - Glenn Adamson

Ashwini Bhat Ghost Print 1.0, 2018 Fired and painted clay, with glass medium and glaze 7h x 9w in

Ashwini Bhat Ghost Print 4.0, 2018 Fired and painted clay, with glass medium and glaze 7h x 9w in

Ashwini Bhat Ghost Print 3.0, 2018 Fired and painted clay, with glass medium and glaze 7h x 9w in

Ashwini Bhat Ghost Print 2.0, 2018 Fired and painted clay, with glass medium and glaze 7h x 9w in

FEATURING PAINTINGS BY EVE ASCHHEIM Eve Aschheim was born in New York City and studied art at the University of California, Berkeley (BA, 1984) and the University of California, Davis (MFA, 1987). Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States and Europe. Selected solo exhibitions include Lori Bookstein Fine Art (New York, 2006), University Gallery at the Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts (Amherst, 2003), Galerie Rainer Borgemeister (Berlin, 1999 and 2000) and Galleri Magnus Aklundh (Lund, Sweden, 1999). Aschheim has received fellowships from the Elizabeth Foundation, the Polluck-Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award. Eve Aschheim Everchanging Violet (EA 6005), 2013 Oil on canvas on panel 24 1/16h x 18 1/16w in

Eve Aschheim LL-4 (EA7803), 2015 Oil on canvas on panel 16 x 12 in

Eve Aschheim BLL-1(EA7808), 2015 Oil on canvas on panel 14 x 11 in

Eve Aschheim LL-6(EA7805), 2015 Oil on canvas on panel 16 x 12 in

Eve Aschheim Falling to Curve(EA8000), 2017 Oil on canvas on panel 16 x 12 in

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