Portrait Society Explores the ‘Magic Mud’ of Ceramics

×

Expand

Photo via Portrait Society Gallery

‘Dollhouse’ by John Behnke

‘Dollhouse’ by John Behnke

"Magic Mud” an exhibition at Portrait Society Gallery on view through January 10, 2025, goes a long way to reconcile the fraught relationship between ceramics and fine art. The title alone tips curator and gallery owner Debra Brehmer’s hand just a little bit as it leans toward the charmed potential for silicated earth to transcend its humble material origins and objectified associations. Still, biases might persist in the minds of a public steeped in pop-consumption and recent art history. Pottery and earthenware, much like photography and textiles, continue to fight off misconceptions born of their relationships to more utilitarian functions. Magic Mud reminds us that it takes nothing more than a thoughtful curator sourcing a cohort of talismanic practitioners to reframe expectations. 

The annex outside the gallery holds several works by local sculptor and professor of ceramics at UWM Michael Ware. His works sit on clean white pedestals but look like they’d rather be in the alley out back making mischief. The colorful tangles of clay look like swollen abstract expressionist paintings coming to life, with variegated bursts, ropey extrusions, and puffs of cooked stone barely concealing vessels at their core. 

Inside the main gallery Santiago Cucullu’s ceramic saucers and bowls live literally in-between art and architecture. His glazed jewels hang on the inside wall of the space within a network of gestural black brushwork. The wall drawing becomes like an ore suspending his colorful ceramic nuggets in place. The East wall of the adjacent gallery graces what at first appears to be a series of rusty iron implements unearthed from a mining site. Or maybe an array of iron-age artifacts awaiting an archeologist’s appraisal. One assumes they must be baked clay, but Brit Krohmer’s misshapen, rust-caked little gems misdirect us from conventional logic in the best possible way. Material and cognitive alchemy at the same time. 

Improvisational Funhouse

Expand

Photo via Portrait Society Gallery

‘The Rats Ate the Screen’ by Alita Van Hee

‘The Rats Ate the Screen’ by Alita Van Hee

A totemic stack of five heads by Diego Sosa pulls us back from ancient earth into an improvisational funhouse of glitchy, high-chroma mania. His work approaches as surely as Krohmer’s retreats. The contrast between these two artists reflects the formal and morphological diversity in the exhibition. From a series of elegant ceramic ropes by Janelle Gramling to a small, metallic panther’s head by Shandrewick Key, Magic Mud obliterates expectations about pots, mugs, and trivets. So much so that it has no problem letting a few beauties back in.

While the exhibition subverts and reorders assumptions about content, it also transforms material at a human level. Magic Mud is a collaboration with Project Onward, an art studio that assists disabled artists in Chicago. The show incorporates the work of several of their artists including John Behnke’s wildly expressive birds, Alita Van Hee’s text and patterned panels, and Cherryl Booker’s wonderfully strange figurines. The work of these artists adds a very palpable earnestness and richness to an exhibition already loaded in it.

And there’s so much more. The exhibition is stocked with oddballs and surprises that will make you realize why art mattered in the beginning, before contemporary art and your polished tastes started to merge. Before cups and plates took over for pies made of brown goop and embedded stones. Art started off for all of us as bag of potential alternatives to the functional predictability of our modern world. For many of us it started in the ground and the dirt, so it makes sense to be able to relocate that magic in a show pulled from the mud.