Artists at Play

Artist at Play

Alex Hoang

Play is a pivotal part of childhood as much as responsibility is essential to growing up. When asked why artists produce artwork, nostalgia and thoughts of childhood comes to mind. Parents would consider a child's creative process as play and they wouldn't be wrong. One of the most memorable toys for children had play in the name. Play-Doh©[1] has been accepted into the Strong National Museum of Play[2] in Rochester and has been around for almost nine decades. This soft and colorful “dough” is probably a child's first contact with organic sculpture, Legos©[3] being the next step.


By associating play with the process of art, I have found four artist that show important instances of play in different aspects that unite them together. I am leaning heavily on the process of the work to promote unity rather than the actual pieces itself.


The first artist is Los Angeles based with a BFA at the School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and an MFA at the prestigious New York State College of Ceramics. Weronika Zaluska[4] is originally from Warsaw, Poland and moved to America when she was eighteen to begin her studies in higher learning. Weronika specialized in clay and has recently left that medium behind for a lighter material.


She states a few times in an interview between Cary Tobin[5] and herself that she has never sewn before. And somehow, she manages to use tiny straight stitches to create soft organic forms that are reminiscent of the quilting process. The art piece shown here is called Pink Puffs and has been equated with pastries along with several other organic felt forms. In her past, she was very devoted to clay and is very connected to that medium because it was a balance between the clay deciding what to do and her own thoughts of how the piece should turn out in the end. But, as it turned out, as much as she loved the dialogue she had with the clay, the material was too heavy, often over one hundred pounds. And the seriousness of the material was as cumbersome as its weight.




In Pink Puffs, Weronika uses a cylindrical shape, very much like toilet paper rolls repeated five times and fused together with a delicate flourish at the bottom like little bed skirts. This piece teases at the ability to be functional and makes the viewer come up with several ideas as to how to use this sweet and strange sculpture. The fact that there are five holes in the piece are a reminder of doughnuts and there is even a piece that looks very much like doughnuts but aren't fused together called White Doughnuts.

The fact that the viewer wants to utilize her work is a part of the process as well. During her interview with Tobin, the topic of touchability comes up. The work is often so organic that it has a mind of it's own. Weronika can sew them together and they might look one way on her lap as she's stitching the pieces together, but when it hangs up on the wall or is placed elsewhere, it takes on a different form. And the material is so soft and the colors so inviting, that the viewer cannot help but want to touch them. On many accounts, they have and it is the preferred method of experiencing the work. A few times during the interview, Weronika refers to her newer art as being more playful. This allows the viewer of her work to become more relaxed and casual with her pieces.

The more quilt like of Weronika Zaluska's work are her wall hangings. These pieces hint at both quilt work and two dimensional abstract paintings. For example, Weronika feels that she is often inspired by Robert Ryman[6] and wants to use her textile medium to reference his paintings. I see the resemblance between their work when I compare Robert Ryman's Wedding Day painting with Weronika Zaluska's Joker sculpture. The colors are similar. There is frequent use of white and an over all accent with citrus colors. The strokes that Ryman uses seem as if they were applied by dry sing and he uses about the same size stroke repeatedly throughout the composition. Zaluska does the same, using the same sewn form as if they were brush strokes throughout her own wall hanging sculpture.

Christina West[7] is also an artist that plays. Though, on her site, it states that her humor is dry, it doesn't exactly come across that way with her sculptures. A graduate of New York State College of Ceramics, she found that the name of her alma mater has wowed her prospective patrons and employers as much as her work has.

Her sculptures are human in form but not quite life sized. The fact that the various figures are smaller than the viewer is a little off putting but it also makes these active nudes a little less imposing and intimidating. These figures are usually in some type of movement or awkward positioning that makes the viewer react in terms of our own creation. The creation of the narrative is a formal way of suggesting play or “pretend.” When the viewer is put into this position of being responsible for the storyline of Christina's figures, we become a part of her art as well, actively creating characters for these nude people that we feel a little nervous about staring at.

During my interview with Christina, I have learned that she uses more than one kind of medium. Besides clay, she uses acrylic to paint them with and also casts with a kind of rubber which adds a depth to her figure. Her sculptures are smooth and so very realistic. Their eyes have a steady gaze which gives them an eerie life despite their humorous postures, activities, and body types.

For instance, the figure here is crouching nude save for a pair of hiking boots that are unlaced. The image is photographed at an angle that seems to emphasize the penis because the bent knees are open and the figure's head is down and turned to the side. The only noticeable color on the figure are the brown boots. But frequently, West gives just the lightest accent to the inner lips with pink and follows the rim of the eyes in just a touch of that pink color. This hint of color gives a look of life, again, and also the look of inner warmth showing through the cold material.

In the interview, West proceeds to describe a show she is currently working on that falls even closer to the artist at play and play in general. Though there are not any photos yet, I did get to hear her describe Victorian porcelain dolls with soft torsos. There would be multiples of these and she hopes that they might trigger a sense of nostalgia as well as that eerie accent she uses so well in her clay figurative work. The only problem, she thinks, is that she doesn't know how to sew.

I believe that Weronika Zaluska and Christina West should have their work shown together in the hypothetical space of a two room gallery. By putting them together, I am taking the liberty to play with their pieces as a curator. I would love to see Weronika's pieces used as objects for Christina's figures. Christina has a few figures that are placed up close to a wall and I would like to place that sculpture up against Weronika's wall hangings as if the figure is feeling the softness of the material with the hardness of its face. The image here is very funny to me, and I would love if these figures were somehow mobile so that I would not be the only person playing. If, somehow, these figure were on wheels, I think attendees would move through the space, not alone, but with a clay partner and the space would stay the same but the art would constantly be moving.

Carmen Lozar[8] is a well traveled artist whose concentration is in glass. She was awarded an MFA from Alfred University after her residency at Corning Museum of Glass. She utilizes flameworking which, in Paul Stankard's opinion, used to be “considered the bastard stepchild of glassblowing, and the brunt of jokes by blowers, because they considered the resulting work kitsch.”[9]

The piece shown here is a setup of rows of glass animals. These glass creatures have an assortment of mix matched items parading as either their trunk, limb, or ear. They look as if they have been nursed by an imaginative child and continue on with their supposed activity with foreign protuberances for the rest of their lifespan.


Lozar's pieces are often of moments; A single scene and a deliberate feeling of either relaxation or happy engorgement. For instance, here, there is a moment between a couple in bed beneath a sheet made of wild flowers and a single buzzing bee. The activity of the couple is sexual in nature but the intimations of sexuality are so innocent that the viewer is drawn towards it instead of shying away. And when the viewer is close enough, they are allowed to touch it because it is a kinetic glass sculpture. There is a delicate handle on the left that can be turned, and when turned, the little bee on the blanket of flowers and grass takes flight to land on another flower bud, referencing fertilization.







Peter Morgan[10] is an equally playful artist with an MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics. His work, as described by Christina West during our interview, “is obviously playful because the stylization of his figures are cartoon like. They seem to reference toys... and handling of the material is casual [like how] a child might render something. The casual handling makes it seem fun and whimsical.”[11]

Morgan's work is not often seen displayed on a pedestal but rather on the ground with hints of the animals habitat. For instance, his gopher sculptures are surrounded by singular clay pieces that look like cartoonish flowers and gopher holes. It turns the gallery space into a surreal scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit[12], a balance between the real viewer and the fake flowers and cartoon gophers jumping into their holes. Only some of his pieces are casually rendered. Others are more detailed such as his ship series seemingly held up by a chain connected to an anchor. It still has a sort of whimsical aura about it but it certainly isn't rendered by a child.


Peter Friedl[13] also uses animals in his work. He was born in Austria in 1960 has exhibited in Documenta X. Upon glancing at Let's Entertain: Life's Guilty Pleasures, I found an image of Peter Friedl's work to resemble Peter Morgans work in the opposite way. Peter Friedl still uses animals to fill his space with whimsy, but he replaces the clay with cloth, which reminded me of Zaluska's felt sculptures. Friedl, creates costumes for adults as well as children so that they might wear them and prance about with a new identity for a few moments before discarding it. The difference here, besides the material and Friedl's political slant[14], is the ability of the viewer to transform into the cartoon themselves.
I feel as if Lozar and Morgan would be perfect to show in a room separate from Zaluska and West.

In Lozar and Morgan's room, together their art can achieve the same mobile whimsy and humor. I would like to set up the floor of the room with several pieces of Peter Morgan's clay animal sculptures, knowing full well that they can move and be placed whereever in the space whenever the viewer so chooses. As for Carmen Lozar's works, some of which belong on the walls, will be placed on walls and shelves so the viewer could “play” with these objects.

Play is important to really experiencing life. Everyone has played before, even as adults the verb play is used. Playing with one's hair describes to our minds the texture with our fingertips. Playing with one's food makes the act of eating something repulsive less horrific. Playing with each other's feelings teaches us the boundaries of emotion. Play is an enhancement when it comes to art. “ (1) [...] Art and play as behaviors share major features in common, they are related to each other and (2) that artistic behavior in its origin and through its evolution enhanced man's sociality and was especially selected and progressively refined because of this property.”[15] When an artist makes art that can be touched, the viewer is better linked to the creator of the object. And when an object can be touched, the viewer will be kept entertained longer than if it were only something on the wall.


Bibliography

[B] Ellen Dissanyake, "Evolution of Art From Play" in Leonardo, 89-91.

[B] Peter Friedl , “Reach Out an Elect Someone” in Let's Entertain: Life's Guilty Pleasures. Neil Postman, 207-227.

[B] Emma Duncan, “The Business of Fun” in Let's Entertain: Life's Guilty Pleasures, 98- 117.


Footnotes
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play-Doh
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_National_Museum_of_Play
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego
4 http://weronikazaluska.com/artwork/223286_Los_Angeles_CA.html
5 http://www.bemiscenter.org/includes/downloads/weronikazaluskaair07.m4a
6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ryman
7 http://cwestsculpture.com/
8 http://carmenlozarglass.com/index.html
9 http://carmenlozarglass.com/articles.html Glass Line article by Paul Stankard
10 http://petergmorgan.com/artwork.php
11 Interview with Christina West
12 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Framed_Roger_Rabbit
13 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Friedl Work in Progress!
14 http://liminalspaces.org/?page_id=19 Friedl's Political involvment with the Palestinian Association for Contemporary Art (PACA)
15 Ellen Dissanyake, "Evolution of Art from Play," in Leonardo, 89-91.