standard, abstract
John Shea’s practice belongs with equal comfort to pottery, painting, sculpture, and installation art and yet—a free radical—it belongs exclusively to no one camp. Instead, the work lives confidently in a world of in-betweens. The result feels nuanced, self-nurturing, and balanced. In a world suffering from extremes and tribalism, Shea’s formalism dwells happily in the middle.
Starting from a shaped, wooden base, the artist hand builds his forms by pinching together small balls of clay. Some surfaces are then burnished smooth as flat planes and others left lumpy and rounded, but neither is too perfectly so. These ceramic sculptures are both muscularly abstract and evoke their own delicate elements, such as silica crystals, viewed through an electron microscope. They are both parts and the sum of their parts.
With off-kilter shades that include raspberry, yellow-orange, dusty green, and bluish-purple, the artist’s color palette comes from A Dictionary of Color Combinations by Japanese painter Sanzo Wada, a book that first appeared in 1932. Here, too, Shea shows his consensus building nature—he avoids pure primary colors, and instead mixes colors to create secondaries and tertiaries. These muted colors play well with each other, becoming an interdependent, mutual admiration society of color that fills a room. The palette’s in-between-ness is calming—nothing shouts or demands attention. Yet these colors pique the brain’s pleasure center.
Shea layers one color on top of another with spray gun and drip techniques. One color peeks through another’s veil at times, creating yet another shade. The technique is similar to glazing in painting, where layers of translucent oils shine through each other from murky depths. And note, Shea’s colored surfaces are oil-based enamels rather than ceramic glazes. This is where his work tips into the realm of painting quite comfortably. In fact, walking around his sculptures feels like experiencing painting in a new way—as a horizontally splayed-out installation of bobbing color, rather than a dense, vertical painted surface.
In a recent exhibition, Shea created a clearly demarcated, rectangular island of sculpture. His landscape of pedestals of different heights was built from Oriented Strand Board, or OSB. Similar to particle board, this woody material has a variegated surface. Again, Shea avoided purities like flat white pedestals, and the light-colored wood spoke the right dialect of in-between-ness as the sculptures. The result of the two together was harmonious and calm.
The conversational nature of Shea’s works is due, in part, to such placement on a construction-worker’s Acropolis. And like a group of students learning through the Socratic method, his colorful sculptures stand in dialogue with each other, each interrogating the nature of objectness. Or rather, thingness. Because Shea is interested in Bill Brown’s concept of “Thing Theory.” Put into too brief words, an object has a known purpose and fulfills it, but once it breaks down in some way and its usefulness is compromised, it becomes a thing. Are Shea’s forms objects or things? Has he broken down neat categories of painting, sculpture, and ceramics in way that turn his works into things? What was the original purpose to be broken down and who was the end user?
This work’s satisfying complexity comes from layers of interrelationships. Not only do these sculptures’ tiny parts speak to their whole outward selves, but their colors blend into mixtures of togetherness, and the sculptures play among each other with delight. They are a geography around which viewers move, and as they do, visual relationships playfully shift and change. Shea’s colors and forms need one another and yet, made in a studio by the same hands, his ceramic sculptures are independent beings who will carry the knowledge of each other into the world.
Essay by Catherine Walworth, Jackye and Curtis Finch, Jr., Curator of Drawings, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts
Objective
“For the typologist the type (eidos) is real and the variation an illusion, while for the populationist, the type (the average) is an abstraction and only the variation real. No two ways of looking at nature could be more different.”
-Ernst Mayr
Variation within species, abstraction as type. The averages of the work become the systems under which production of form occur, producing an array of objects that all relate, both in kind and in type, standing as individuals. Elements turn into methods of identification, processes solidify and become records of handling, forms built from mounds of earth.
Structures form, fall apart, and form again. Material becomes discrete objects -- then morph into relationships, conditions of display, compete and complete -- turning objects into objects. Objects determining the way in which objects mesh to become more objects, to become more objects, to become more objects. Alone, together.
Light becomes color, illuminations questioning our perceptions, a constant itch in the eye. Variegated surfaces serve to serve a cacophony of hue and saturation blended to distort and deform. Discrepancies between the real and the sensual, seduction under false pretense, emanations from within.
Object Logic
What makes an object an object? Even as forms shift, surfaces alter, and finishes change among the objects, each piece seeks an answer to that question. The work here approaches from an oblique angle, built on an understanding of the history of sculptural presentations and using the idioms present in ceramic traditions to create an idiosyncratic basis for the work.
The idiosyncrasies in these objects, constructed through a regime of repetition and differences, are mirrored in their pedestals. A shifting language of pedestal and non-pedestal seeks to both centralize and decentralize the objects that sit upon them. For some pieces the object and the pedestal act as one and in others a clear hierarchy takes place. While many of the objects strive to a kind of autonomy, like so many other objects, they clearly rely on the support apparatus of their respective presentations.
This support framework, one in which the object’s objectness is affirmed but also questioned, begins to ask us to ask questions of what it means to be an object.
Bizarre Stuff
Each piece has a sense of frozen time, a moment in which something has happened or is waiting to happening. These candy colored amorphous shapes begin consuming their rough mottled support structures. Their bright, slick surfaces giving way to uneasy feelings, each one becomes an uncanny familiar of gestural presence.
Constructed with small balls of clay, all pressed and pinched together, the bottom supports are left rough and well handled. The top portion of each piece has this same texture stripped away. The pieces are then painted and a thin resin shell is applied to the top.