MoNA Ceramic Invitational 2025: Build Me Up, Tear Me Down, Why Don’t You Love Me Babe Like There’s No One Around?
Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, WA - To May 11
Twelve artists working in various aspects of ceramics, such as statuettes, vases and abstract forms, feature in the inaugural installment of a new series of medium-based invitationals at the Museum of Northwest Art. Organized by executive director and chief curator Stefano Catalani, Build Me Up, Tear Me Down, Why Don’t You Love Me Babe Like There’s No One Around? may be an allusion to the changing fortunes of ceramic art in general. High, low, popular, elite, its audiences and critical stature have shifted over hundreds of years. Several of the artists explicitly note their debts to Europe’s first porcelain, Meissen ware, manufactured at the royal court of Augustus the Strong, in Dresden, Germany, in 1710.
Claudia Fitch pays tribute to the original Meissen female statuettes but updates them in contemporary fashion magazine poses and, since they lack heads, emphasizes their simultaneous origins as vases, or “female vessels.” Portland-based Dirk Staschke has also exhibited at Western Front in Vancouver, BC, with his spectacularly ornate porcelain floral arrangements that reference high-style Dresden historical models. Equally indebted to Meissen is Patti Warashina’s Gossipmongers (2010), a parody of Meissen figure groups of saints and apostles.
Tip Toland’s highly realistic nude males and female figures stretch the limits of scale and size, often thought to be limitations of the clay medium. Works such as The Greedy King (2021), drawing on the sinister side of fairy tales, continue to attain national and international attention, similar to those of Australian artist Ron Mueck.
Catalani has assembled artists representing today’s extreme stylistic differences, from the garish kitsch of Emily Counts to the austere assemblages of Hungarian artist Timea Tihanyi. Including works by Iván Carmona, Daniel Duford, Ariana Heinzman, Holly Hudson, Ryan W. Kelly and Chris Theiss, Build Me Up will give visitors a delightful and refreshing view of the clay world today.
