Student’s ceramics gallery shows ‘artistic liberation’

Art versus design has been a longstanding divider in the worlds of artists, designers and the often-unmentioned crafters and artisans. That is to say, artists and designers belong to a different camp than the latter. This has not always been the case, and ceramics is one of the last surviving links of that evolution. Brittany Mojo's first solo show stands to remind us just what ceramics is today.

Mojo's exhibit, "Copy/Paste: An Exploration of Multiples" contains several of her recent ceramic "assemblages" — her term to denote the work's existence between sculpture and installation. Each piece acts as installation in itself, as they are consisted of smaller works from different mediums, and then assembled into a larger system.

Mojo integrates these distant pieces, not on a basis of formal continuity but a continuity of process. Each piece contains multiple results from attempting to translate two-dimensional work into the third dimension.

Beginning with a stream of consciousness drawing, Mojo then turns to a variety of sculptural mediums for a successful translation in dimension. Repetition is key, as she mentions "in the process of making the same object repetitively, the monotony leads the brain to problem solve ways in which to make this process more efficient."

The various attempts are then integrated into a singular piece. An example of this is "Things My Father Used to Say," which is constructed from a medley of paper clay, wood, marker, tape, fabric, paper, porcelain, wool, wire and pencil. The result is hard to describe but easy to appreciate — consider a few postmodern sculptures of the same subject joined into one.

While the gallery is filled with a healthy amount of work, it is only a fraction of the possible choices Mojo could have installed. Since July, she has been relentlessly attacking her drawings' two-dimensionality, thus amassing more than 100 pieces. On display is well-resolved work with fascinating aesthetics, but the cream of the crop could still be hidden in the boxes gracing her studio.

Mojo's focus is not the product as much as the process. She hopes for juxtaposing results.

She said, "A piece is complete when I come to the realization that I'm making the form completely different than when I started but it's the still the same original product."

Work like "Three Generations of Women," made up of paper, glue, porcelain, string, pencil, thread and fabric, display the distance she could travel in transforming her original idea to its last translation. This piece drapes porcelain and string down from a ceiling mounted "tensegrity," its shadow outlined on the wall like a Sol Lewitt drawing. This piece's abstract and distant visual language is far removed from its conceptual origin — a conversation between Mojo, her mother and grandmother.

"Copy/Paste" is a far cry from the traditions of ceramics, which many practitioners still cling to. While painting widely rejected realistic imagery when the photograph was invented, ceramics did not have as drastic a reaction to industrialization.

When Mojo felt trapped by the strict traditionalism surrounding her medium, artists Chris Miller and Julia Haft-Candell inspired her to realize "you don't have to use ceramics to be a ceramic artist."

Her mission was an affirmation of medium and exploration of its contemporaries, and her hundreds of results produced a success. All her artistic liberation took was a studio full of more "assemblages" than she knows what to do with.

The weekly galleries run Monday through Thursday from noon to 5 p.m. between the FA2 and FA3 buildings.

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