Such a kiln joy
Ceramicist Annabeth Rosen creates 3-D collages that seem to evoke tragedy and humor
Who with a heart isn’t feeling fired, broken, gathered and heaped these days?
Pick your crisis — political, humanitarian, environmental — any aspect of our hot mess of a world could make the title of Annabeth Rosen’s show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston seem like a reminder of our sad-sack state of mind.
“Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped” does, in fact, also perfectly describe the ceramic sculptures Rosen has produced during the past 20 years, and her process for making them.
Though I knew that going in, until last week I had seen her work only in photographs. I wasn’t prepared for the visceral rush of walking around them in all their raw, three-dimensional glory, and the powerful impact of the calmly colored but urgently intense drawings she creates to build her “muscle memory” for making the ceramics.
In a vulnerable mood, I saw things in the sculptures that made me want to cry — a matte glaze that looked like dried, salty sweat on human skin; the stripes of a jail uniform; all these black-and-white bits irrevocably tangled.
But I could just as easily have been laughing hysterically: For every bit of the tragic they might have projected at that moment, they also had a heady amount of bouyant, cartoony humor.
Throwing viewers off balance seems to be part of the point.
Either way, this is an elegantly staged show. Former senior curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, recently hired away by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, has left her hometown with a cool doozy of a parting gift, installing Rosen’s work in a way that’s both theatricality vivid and calmly ordered. How else to make sense of works that thrive on chaos?
Front and center stand seven large, stacked totemlike sculptures on casters, against a backdrop of seven large drawings. These sculptures are essentially three-dimensional collage, each stacked with voluptuous masses of writhing forms that made me think of the fruits of a Carmen Miranda hat.
They’re like buxom showgirls flashing their skirts, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them come to life when humans vacate the gallery at night, ready to crank up the music and dance. Yet — and here’s that duality — these mysterious things are also awkward above their skinny steel legs, bound to earth by their weighty sensibility.
What a madwoman Rosen must be in her studio, where she forms the elements of these anthropomorphic marvels in wet clay, fires them in a kiln and then often goes at them with a chisel and hammer, to create elements she reassembles, paints and glazes — sometimes shiny, sometimes matte and rarely in equal measure.
A Brooklyn, N.Y., native who has taught for years at the University of California, Davis, Rosen builds on the tradition of West Coast ceramic pioneers such as Peter Voulkos and Ken Price, who pushed their once functional craft well beyond the bounds of utilitarian vases and bowls into the realm of conceptual art.
Another critic once described Rosen’s work as “fabulously, gorgeously useless.” It’s also unabashedly feminist.
Smaller works from several series fill a humongous table. Within some of these curiosities, a viewer might occasionally discern a recognizable form — a bird, say, or a flower or seed pods — but many of them teem with more slippery, organic forms that speak of creation, destruction and regeneration — veins, roots, bulbous things, blobs, organs. Another table holds a series of small works that appear to have been inspired by melting glaciers.
In a far corner, the show’s largest sculpture suggests a wave of swimming sperm, rising up and crashing into itself. I think it’s called “Roil.”
Rosen often gives her works enignmatic, pithy titles, but they are not acknowledged in this show. I saw no labels for the sculptures and few for the drawings, so the works aren’t dated, either. The neat groupings of sculptures provide the only indication of the artist’s recent decades of shifting ideas and experimentation.
That frustrated me for a nanosecond. Then it seemed a blessing — as if Cassel Oliver and Rosen didn’t want to burden viewers with too much information.
Better to let the fun house take heads where it may. If that’s a different place on different days, all the better.