Say It With Ceramics
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Ceramist Karen Swyler took naturally to her work: her mother made and sold pottery, and the family ate from her mother’s dinnerware. Swyler started making usable vessels in high school, then in 1994 enrolled in Alfred University’s noted undergraduate ceramics program. But a few years ago, near the end of grad school at the University of Colorado at Boulder, she started making nonfunctional pieces for the first time. “I wasn’t satisfied,” she says. “I wanted the work to change more and I wasn’t sure how.” Noticing that “I didn’t have time to spend with the people I wanted to spend time with,” she started considering her work a metaphor for the conversations she wasn’t having. Her show at Dubhe Carreno includes a piece called Foster, which shows three long-necked bottles, one much taller than the other two, pressed so closely together that each appears to indent the next. Swyler says she was thinking about “how my mother has been a caregiver to my younger sister and me.” A bird-watcher since childhood, she also had in mind the way mother birds nurture their young.
When: Through Tue 9/6
The most striking pieces in John Wanzel’s show at BSD are his sculptures of lampposts: placed on unremarkable representations of grass or asphalt, they lean over too far to be realistic but are still made with loving attention to detail. Wanzel’s interest in streetlights stems from his early days in Chicago: when he moved here in 1997, transferring from a college in Kenosha to the School of the Art Institute, he had little money and walking was both “really cheap entertainment” and a way of exploring the largest city he’d ever lived in. He still walks today, sometimes with friends and often without a destination; a typical trip might take him from his Ukrainian Village apartment to the lake and back. “You see the city in a different light,” he says. “The scale is changed, and you can spend longer looking at the houses or condos or stores that you go by.” But the old buildings, the ones he likes, are now threatened. “The new condos are a lot less interesting visually than the buildings they usually replace,” he says. All his sculptures are of older street lamp models, “overhead types that seem to be the last things to go when a neighborhood starts to gentrify.”
Info: 312-421-1917
