Dialectic of Failure, 2013

Screampots

Installation view at West Vancouver Museum

In Dialectic of Failure clay, and the idea of craft, are used to speak to the painstaking and delicate nature of compromise and negotiation between dichotomies—historicism and modernity, art and craft, modern reasoning and traditional mysticism.

The engagement with the idea of craft derives from its slow process, which allows for a different model of production and time for thought and reflection; a model that can be studied and adapted to address conditions of contemporary life. The clay-based artworks are the reconciliation of a medium conventionally defined as craft and therefore outside of critical contemporary art discourse.

Two small black and white images depict the artist caught in the act of throwing. Throwing, however, has a double meaning here as both the craft of making a clay pot on a potter’s wheel and in the literal sense.

The wheel thrown pots are not ordinary functional vessels either. Instead the red-clay “scream pots” which at once resemble internal organs and the domes of mosques or churches, are designed to muffle the sound of a scream. They are participatory works and visitors can choose to pick up a pot, bring it up to their mouth and scream into it. The other works in the exhibition are the product of clay being forcibly thrown against a wall. In this work, there is a sense of release and satisfaction achieved by hurling the clay, similar to the effect of screaming.

Underlying all these works are themes of suppression and emotional distress as contemporary human conditions. People are compelled to react, scream or revolt in response to fear or pent-up emotion from continual and mounting pressures that are often unexplainable by reason. Dialectic of Failure invites the viewers to re-evaluate material and the function of craft and art while considering limitations of reason as the sole means of understanding and coping with global challenges. At once poetic yet literal, thoughtful yet mischievous, the works in Dialectic of Failure point to the complexity of our time.

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