The Curated Object

Exhibitions Tempe. SUSAN BEINER: SYNTHETIC REALITY. The Arizona State University Art Museum. The Curated Object

Susan Beiner, Synthetic Reality (detail), 2007
Cast porcelain, glazes
Photo: Darien Johnson, courtesy of the ASU Herberger College of the Arts

Susan Beiner, Synthetic Reality (detail), 2007
Cast porcelain, glazes
Photo: Darien Johnson, courtesy of the ASU Herberger College of the Arts
The encrusted walls of floors of Susan Beiner’s Synthetic Reality, 2007, showing at the ASU Art Museum Ceramic Research Center on the Arizona State University Tempe campus through August 2. Photos courtesy of the ASU Herberger College of the Arts.

Susan Beiner, Synthetic Reality (detail), 2007
Cast porcelain, glazes
Photo: Darien Johnson, courtesy of the ASU Herberger College of the Arts
The encrusted walls of floors of Susan Beiner’s Synthetic Reality, 2007, showing at the ASU Art Museum Ceramic Research Center on the Arizona State University Tempe campus through August 2. Photos courtesy of the ASU Herberger College of the Arts.

SUSAN BEINER: SYNTHETIC REALITY
March 15-August 2, 2008

What you see is not always what you get. In our digitized, photo-shopped world, reality is often altered and manipulated. Reality television shows seem unreal. With today’s technology, many products we use daily are manufactured with artificial materials or manipulated DNA aided by scientific processes, reshaping what was once all natural. Biotechnology allows for genetically altered foods grown in controlled environments, gene splicing produces cloned animals and hybridization of consumer products has changed our lives forever. Ethical issues continue to challenge these advancements. What are the costs of scientific efficiency versus environmental and health concerns?

Taking more than a year to complete, Synthetic Reality is the most ambitious mixed-media installation project created by Arizona State University Herberger College School of Art ceramic faculty member Susan Beiner. A childhood interest in the sciences, stimulated by her father’s vocation as a chemist, has lead to a recent fascination with making what is organic into synthetic. Clay and ceramic materials are natural materials mined from the earth; additional industrial materials (foam, Plexiglas and rubber) assist the artist in making an engineered environment. A fascination with opposites is employed as an artistic strategy: natural and contrived; minimal to baroque; and handmade versus industrial. “My interest is fueled by elements of layering, fragmentation, multiplication, juxtaposition and complication collecting in a room-sized gallery,” says Beiner.

This project is composed primarily of slip-cast porcelain forms that are altered and glazed with a luscious palette of colors. Seductive in materials, saturated hues of green, blue, yellows and peach activate the high relief “plant life.” Colors flux together, mirroring the activities of microbes, leech ponds or aerial topography. The walls and floor of the gallery are encrusted with organic ceramic forms that interlock with one another, enveloping the viewer in a teeming sea of barnacled life. The repetition of forms, similar to cloning, becomes an artificial environment transporting the viewer into another world, at times familiar yet foreign.

Trained in classical ceramic forms, Beiner’s career has steadily progressed from an object maker influenced by 18th-century European court porcelains to the creation of large scale environments. A trend in the ceramics field where artists are not confined to the past, but embrace an interdisciplinary postmodernist approach to their studio practice, Susan Beiner’s latest tour de force is a heroic effort to enlighten us on the growing complexities of our lives.
Peter Held, Curator of Ceramics in ASU Art Museum, Ceramics Research Center, curates this exhibition.

ASU Art Museum Presentation
Organized by Peter Held, Susan Beiner: Synthetic Reality takes take place in the Arizona State University Art Museum’s Ceramic Research Center.

Duration
Susan Beiner: Synthetic Reality (March 15 through August 2, 2008) is open at the Ceramics Research Center: Tuesday through Saturday from 11am to 5pm, and Sunday 1pm to 5pm, closed Monday.

Support
This exhibition is supported by the Independence Foundation, Philadelphia, a Herberger College of the Arts Research & Creativity grant and members of CLA.

For more information please visit: The ASU Museum of Art

-Joanne Molina

Exhibitions Tempe. MOULTHROP GENERATIONS: Turned Wood Vessels by Ed, Philip, and Matt Moulthrop. Arizona State University Art Museum. The Curated Object: International Decorative Arts Exhibitions...

Matt Moulthrop, Chalice, 2006, Black willow, 14 x 7 1/4 in.. 
ASU Art Museum Collection, Gift of the artist and
Bentley Gallery/Bentley Projects, Scottsdale/Phoenix, AZ.

MOULTHROP GENERATIONS:  Turned Wood Vessels by  Ed, Philip, and Matt Moulthrop       

October 20, 2007 through February 24, 2008

 The Moulthrops are a dynasty of artists – grandfather, son, and grandson – who have made significant contributions to the field of wood turning and share a consistency of vision and process.  Ed began turning as a teenager in the 1930s; Philip began turning in the 1970s; Matt, who has spent his life around wood, is just beginning his career.  Philip and Matt both apprenticed with Ed in Atlanta, Georgia, where each now has his own studio.  Moulthrop Generations: Turned Wood Vessels by Ed, Philip, and Matt Moulthrop presents more than seventy turned wood vessels from 1979 until today by the three   artists. 

The ASU Art Museum has a long history of presenting and collecting contemporary turned wood, beginning with the landmark gift of the Edward “Bud” Jacobson collection in 1989.  Wood turning refers to the use of a lathe to make three-dimensional round forms. A lathe enables an artist to use a stationary blade to carve a revolving block of wood evenly. In the 1960s and 70s, wood turning emerged with other contemporary craft forms as a process and medium for the individual in a studio to express ideas, whether in vessel or sculptural form. Contemporary wood turners use lathes to carve one-of-a-kind wooden bowls or sculptures often removed from traditional functions.        

Together the Moulthrops’ careers frame and exemplify the emergence of wood turning as an art form.  The Moulthrops are known for their concentration on the inherent beauty of local woods, elegant vessel forms, and innovations in surface treatment and turning technique.  Ed Moulthrop began turning when, in a well-known story, he scraped the money together from delivering magazines to buy his first lathe for $16.95.  Now considered one of the grandfathers of contemporary wood turning, he quietly and consistently produced a body of work that meditated on the most perfect form possible with the lathe and the variety of wood found in his home state of Georgia. These preoccupations are the basis of Philip’s and now Matt’s work, with individual variations. Their works are immediately recognizable for the primacy of the wood and the refined vessel forms.

While the Moulthrops are well represented in national and international museum collections, Moulthrop  Generations is the first major   museum exhibition to bring the three generations together.  Moulthrop Generations presents the breadth of their work, and reveals their important place within the field of wood turning and contemporary craft.       

For more information please visit: The Arizona State University Art Museum

-Joanne Molina