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10/7/2013

Ian McDonald / Space, Place, and Order

Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco

Ian McDonald
Parts and Pottery

Ian McDonald's exhibition of ceramic and mixed media sculptures presents a departure from earlier works where a single sculpture consisted of an installation of strategically arranged parts. New work focuses on vessel-like ceramic "core" forms thrown on a potter's wheel and built up by the addition of dissected portions of other vessels or cylinders -a process where he improvises within a set parameter. His guidelines are those of a studio potter - be ever mindful of your materials, observe an economy of form, and use simple glazing to finish. The works reference architecture, design elements, or the rich glazed surfaces of industrial pottery. McDonald's precise command of the medium and his ability to present familiar but oblique forms with such authority, demonstrate a playful interest in functional ware but a deeper appreciation of the sculptural purity occurring when form follows function.

McDonald graduated from UC Santa Barbara in 2000 with an MFA and currently teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2008, his work was included in the "Bay Area Now 5" show at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; his work is also included in the collections of The Museo Internazionale della Ceramiche in Faenza, Italy, and the International Ceramic Center, Denmark.

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Space, Place, and Order

Space, Place, and Order is a group exhibition of work by Tony DeLap, Gilles Barbier, Dennis Gallagher, Doug Hall, Matthias Hoch, Candida Höfer, Amer Kobaslija, and Tommy Støckel. Each artist included utilizes their media - painting, photography, ceramics, and collage - to explore the way we make, use, and understand our constructed environments. Tony DeLap's canvases are visual magic tricks. Composed on flat canvases, his paintings turn sculptural before one's eyes, as if making three-dimensional space in a two-dimensional form. My Living Room is a Martian Colony by Gilles Barbier displays a living space peppered with directive notes that encourage the viewer to imagine an alternate site transported onto the space pictured. Dennis Gallagher's monolithic ceramic sculptures begin as roughly glazed, scored, and stacked clay blocks that combine to become architectonic constructions suggesting the many forms of our urban landscape.

Doug Hall's Chrysopylae II is a two-channel love poem to the Golden Gate Bridge; originally commissioned as a site-specific installation at Fort Point, the synched screens provide a panoramic time lapse of one of San Francisco's most iconic places. Matthias Hoch's carefully composed photographs extract the universal structures - the rhythmic geometry of a wall of alternating glass and concrete bricks, for instance - of modernist and contemporary architecture from the buildings' particular place to explore the forms and spaces per se. Candida Höfer's photographs also focus on the structures of our built spaces, but turn more specifically to the way in which these spaces are composed; from libraries to museums, the institutional interiors she captures beg us to consider how we order our world. In his paintings, Amer Kobaslija accesses space - in this case, the artist's studio - through unexpected angles and expressive brushwork to affect an immediate and intimate portrait of personal space. The intimate, ordered spaces of Tommy Støckel's colorful grids is achieved through collaged paper; variously populated, the miniature stages invite the viewer deeper into a world that functions as a simulacra of our own.

Reception: Saturday, July 11, 5:30-7:30 pm

Rena Bransten Gallery
77 Geary Street | San Francisco | CA | 94108
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday 10:30 to 5:30 and Saturday 11:00 to 5:00
Admission free

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