The following article appeared in The Journal News on Sunday November 9, 2008:

Adventures in clay

By Georgette Gouveia

“Conversations in Clay,” at the Katonah Museum of Art, is an often scintillating, sometimes flawed dialogue between contemporary art and the past.

The Katonah museum is one of 68 venues taking part in “All Fired Up! A Celebration of Clay in Westchester.” Another show under the umbrella is “Hannah Wilke: Gestures,” on view at Purchase College’s Neuberger Museum of Art through Jan. 25.
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Indeed, the best works in the Katonah show, up through Jan. 11, remind viewers that clay was an early building material.

Charles Simonds’ stunning “Mental Earth” (2003), a ropy, knobby hanging sculpture that suggests an airborne continent, is crusted with tiny brick structures resembling step pyramids.

Betty Woodman’s Matisse-like “Ceramic Pictures of Roman Paintings” (2007), which marry glazed earthenware to painting, refer to ancient vessels, Renaissance frescoes and Portuguese tiles.

Marek Cecula’s “Klepisko” (2008) - it’s Polish for “dirt or clay floor” - also plays with two- and three-dimensionality, its fissures revealing neoclassical architectural elements that seem to be from another time.

These works are not merely thought-provoking. They’re lovely to look at.

Another provocative beauty, of the minimalist type, is Jeffrey Mongrain’s “Our Eyes Are Opened (1805)/We Are Truly One (2008),” a bisected disk that looks like a flat, shelled, roasted walnut.

Actually, the piece is supposed to evoke the two hemispheres of the brain. Emanating from the right hemisphere is the “Our eyes are opened” phrase, from an address on mutual respect between American Indians and white missionaries given by the Seneca chief, Red Jacket.

The left hemisphere echoes the “We are truly one” thought from a March 18 speech by President-elect Barack Obama. Sound and sight, left and right, sculpture and painting, native and immigrant - Mongrain embraces duality as Chief Red Jacket and Obama did in their talks.

Other works in the show are conceptual without being particularly aesthetic.

Michael Lucero of Nyack creates colorful ceramic totems made of various objects and glazes. For “Light Project” (2008), he has placed these on overhead projectors to cast shadow-plays on gallery walls. Some of these are arresting, like the duck with the butterfly hanging from its beak. The clunky setup, however, is not.

The problem with conceptual art is that often the concept is all there is to it. So if you get the idea quickly or don’t like it, well, there’s not much there there, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein.

Denise Pelletier’s “Hygeia” (2008), named for the Greek goddess of health, consists of ceramic and rubber evocations of bedpans, organs and hot-water bottles, connected by copper pipes. It’s a metaphor for the circulatory system. A-ha. And do we really want to look at bedpans?

Sometimes, the concept isn’t well-thought-out. Ann Agee’s “Boxing” (2005-08) is made up of ceramic figurines amid Pepto-Bismol-colored shrubs on a table. Apparently, the display recalls commedia dell-arte characters and the 18th-century practice of grouping porcelain figurines on a dining table. According to the accompanying text, Agee also “shines a spotlight on the balancing act required to perform her dual role of artist and mother.”

Huh? There’s no way to deduce this from the actual installation.

Besides which, what’s with all the whining about the struggle to combine career and motherhood? Each day, people juggle multiple roles that were thrust upon them. Art, like motherhood, is a choice. If you can’t do both, pick one.

Wilke, at the Neuberger, was best known as a performance artist/photographer who was fascinated with her own body and materials that could be folded, thus mimicking that body. Early in her career, which ended with her death from lymphoma in 1993, Wilke used clay, latex, chewing gum and other malleable materials to suggest flowers and containers as well as parts of the human body.

After a while, there is a monotony to these sculptures. Perhaps not surprisingly then, the most intriguing work in the show is “Transfigurations” (1989), so reminiscent of Picasso’s erotic drawings in the liveliness of its line.

“Transfigurations” is a series of images of a woman ingesting and emitting birds. Given other works in the show - including a series of photographs of the artist’s mother, who died of breast cancer - you can’t help but see “Transfigurations” as a longing for transcendence.

Perhaps all of Wilke’s obsessive folding was not a yearning to capture the body but a desire to flee it.

Reach Georgette Gouveia at ggouveia@lohud.com or 914-694-5088.

Photos, top to bottom:

Betty Woodman’s Matisse-like “Ceramic Pictures of Roman Paintings” is from the “Conversations in Clay” exhibit at the Katonah Museum of Art.

The fissures in Marek Cecula’s “Klepisko” at the Katonah Museum of Art reveal neoclassical architectural elements that seem to be from another time. (Katonah Museum of Art)

Untitled work by Hannah Wilke is part of “Hannah Wilke: Gestures,” at Purchase College’s Neuberger Museum of Art.

Museum information:

‘Conversations in Clay’
Where: Katonah Museum of Art, off Route 22 at Jay Street.
When: Through Jan. 11.
Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays with evening hours until 8 p.m. Thursdays.
Admission: Free 10 a.m.-noon. From noon to 5 p.m., it’s $5; $3 for senior citizens; free for children under age 12.
Information: 914-232-9555, www.katonahmuseum.org

‘Hannah Wilke: Gestures’
Where: Neuberger Museum of Art, on the campus of Purchase College, Anderson Hill Road between Purchase and King streets.
When: Through Jan. 25.
Hours: Noon-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays.
Admission: $5; $3 for students with ID and senior citizens. Children age 12 and under are admitted free.
Information: 914-251-6100, www.neuberger.org