Currently on view at The Clemente in the Lower East Side is Queer + Peculiar Craft, an exhibition of contemporary ceramics and textiles that examines identity and challenges viewers' expectations of craft.
Queer + Peculiar Craft installation view: works by Phoenix Lindsay-Hall (far left); Greg Climer (right and left of window); Koren Christofides (rear table); Andrew Cornell Robinson (front table); and Roxanne Jackson (far right)
Curated by Andrew Cornell Robinson, the exhibit showcases “an intersectional group of artists who explore craft to transgress expectations of traditional materials, methods, and meaning,” according to the show’s press release. The show features a diverse selection of subversive work that includes pottery, quilting, cross-stitching, printmaking, and crochet employed in unconventional and refreshing ways.
Clockwise from top: Puppetmaster Punch Bowl, Rhyton, and Doll House, all by Koren Christofides
Couple Kissing (blue and yellow), George Climer
#communication (top) and Mincing Queen Mincing Words (bottom), both by Timo Rissannen
Detail of Mincing Queen Mincing Words by Timo Rissannen
One artist featured in the show, Koren Christofides, explores feminism through ceramics. In an email, Robinson explained that some of Christofides' works are soft sculptures made with industrial ceramic fiber insulation covered in paper clay, resulting in pieces that are simultaneously “familiar and strange.” For his prismatic quilts featuring erotic males nudes, Greg Climer reinterprets traditional quilt-making methods by “creating the fabric fragments rather than upcycling scraps,” according to the exhibition essay.
Vick Quezada's Table Remains (front) and Phoenix Lindsey-Hall's Fourteen Blows (rear)
Phoenix Lindsey-Hall's Fourteen Blows
Jamon Jamon V (Chueca), Andrew Cornell Robinson
Works by Andrew Cornell Robinson
Phoenix Lindsey-Hall’s ceramic sculptures play with “repetition and formalism,” according to Robinson. “It uses that formalism to include queer stories within the framework of contemporary aesthetics.” Her Fourteen Blows features a row of white porcelain claw hammers—a weapon used in hate crimes against members of the LGBTQ community—protruding limply from a wall.
Robinson’s own ceramic and mixed media sculptures included in the show “explore historical customs as a metaphor for queer-baiting and conformity.” The sculptures in his Jamon Jamon series reference a medieval Spanish custom in which hosts offered ham to visitors to “sniff out heresy during the inquisition when the pious were looking for expressions of distaste in response to the offer of sliced pork,” the exhibit essay explains. His Jamon Jamon sculptures are a “metaphor about being ‘suspected’ and ‘queer-baited’ as a gay man."
Inspiration for Queer + Peculiar Craft came from a 1993 interview with the late artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres for A.R.T. Press. When asked about the lack of “overt political or Latino content” in his work, Gonzalez-Torres responded:
“I’m not a good token. I don’t wear the right colors. I have my own agenda. Some people want to promote multiculturalism as long as they are the promoters, the circus directors. We have an assigned role that’s very specific, very limited….”
“[Gonzalez-Torres] expressed an impatience that I could identity with as a gay man making art,” Robinson noted. “I felt empowered by his question, ‘Who is going to define my culture?’”
Born in Camden, New Jersey, and raised on the outskirts of NYC, Robinson grew up in a creative family and discovered ceramics at an early age. He studied ceramic sculpture at the Glasgow School of Art and the Maryland Institute College of Art and received his MFA in sculpture from the School of Visual Arts. “I make work that explores identities and lived experiences, but I have often come to the same conclusion that [Gonzalez-Torres] had. Our voice, our creative lineages have broader roots that span across times, cultures, politics, sexualities, genders, languages and media,” he said, noting that he is influenced by poetry, fiction, sculpture, film, dance, and more.
“I have been fascinated by how some artists challenge an accepted idea or a material tradition and are then dismissed or criticized for their peculiar transgression against the norm,” Robinson continued. “I love that sense of the peculiar, the unfamiliar…. It’s exciting.”
Queer + Peculiar Craft installation view
Healer Giant, Roxanne Jackson
Walking Ten More Steps, Suddenly Open, Dad's Tear (top); Walking Ten More Steps, Suddenly Open, Grandmother's Grievance (bottom), both by Lu Zhang
Works by Edmund Green Langdell
Queer + Peculiar Craft on view at The Clemente. _SCAR by Brian Kenny is seen beside door.
The 11 artists included in Queer + Peculiar Craft are based around the world but most have a connection to New York City, Robinson explained. “Some are gay, lesbian, straight and/or transgender. Some are older and younger and represent a multi-racial and multi-cultural group of makers,” he said. “Their work touches upon an underlying sense of being outside of a tradition, culture or common ground, and seeing the world through that particular point of view, which may often be met with suspicion, or dismissal, hence the title Queer and Peculiar.”
With works that address homosexual desire, feminism, transgender narratives, immigration, racism, and class, the artists “push the boundaries of a particular craft tradition by introducing a new technology, material, or by combining new content with anachronistic making methods,” according to Robinson, who adds that the featured artists are “doing something now and new with materials that have deep histories.”
Robinson hopes audiences will be introduced to a new group of artists and “recognize something familiar” in their work. “Perhaps they might see the common grounds that may be found in our queerness and/or peculiarity, and find empathy, or humor, or hope, or recognition,” he said.
Queer + Peculiar Craft
The Clemente, Abrazo Interno Gallery, Second Floor
107 Suffolk Street (between Rivington & Delancey), Lower East Side
Exhibition on view through January 18
Artists' Panel Discussion scheduled for Thursday, January 16, 6pm to 8pm
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