Farroh Cloud Scoop 2019
thrown and altered stoneware forms
Photograph by Jeremy Hogan
the tenure of Barack Obama as president, a time which Malcolm felt was only temporarily masking the real racism at the heart of much of America. His vision now seems prescient. But this is only a small fraction of his encyclopedic output. Malcolm is also a trained draftsman, like his father, and he worked to master the CAD (computer-aided design) system that is so ubiquitous in the studios of working architects. These systems allow him to design three-dimensional forms that would be almost impossible to envision with traditional drawing. Relying on the CAD system, he can build models he subsequently can print out on sophisticated 3-D printers. He describes this endeavor as working on a “pluralistic platform” that allows for “pure plastic potential.” It has been possible for him to design forms that can literally not exist as three-dimensional entities. In some cases, the printer simply ignores the impossibilities and creates workable interfaces while declaring in other cases
His current work, which will be displayed at the prestigious Wexler Gallery in Philadelphia in the upcoming fall season, is both a return to and reinvention of earlier explorations featuring letter and word forms sculpted into vessel-like structures that have moved away from his earlier polychromed forms returning to an acknowledgement of the monochromed essential nature of ceramics. He is now also included in a three-person exhibition at the 411 Gallery in Columbus, Indiana, which happens to be home to one of the great collections of public mid-century modern architecture in America. His show, Felsic Morphology, showcases his newest vessel forms in tableau format. “These new decorative objects operate as signifiers of an acculturation to aestheticized things reflecting desires and imaginations,” says Malcolm.
We Did It 2010
handbuilt stoneware
Photograph by Kevin Montague
graffiti writing; hip-hop music; break dancing; popular comics, especially of the 30s and 40s; jazz music; pre-Columbian pottery; Etruscan vessel forms; and, most importantly, his experiences living as an African American man in the complex bargain insisted upon him by a country that never fails to reinforce his Blackness and remind him daily of the struggle that he and fellow Black Americans face. He has recently completed a series of tableau-like pieces consisting of teapot-sized sculptures sitting on rectangular or wedge-shaped plinths with eccentrically shaped brightly painted backsplashes. From a certain point of view, the sculptures might conjure a memory of early modern sculpture or mid-century container forms, but the shock comes when the back of the piece is viewed: a bent plane is covered with an image drawn from the most-offensive caricatures of Black children sourced from racist cartoons and publications dependent on the promotion of stereotyped depictions. Most of these works were made during
that the form cannot be realized. By asking his drawings to do the impossible, he breaks the traditional relationship between foreground, middle ground, and background. He has partnered with scientists and mathematicians at his university to engage in what he refers to as “reimagining science.” Together, they have produced fantastic, spontaneous forms that can be built and produced on a 3-D clay printer.
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