Third Street Gallery archive: 2012 Exhibitions: Play / House: Works by Claire Joyce and Garth Johnson

Humboldt State University’s First Street Gallery presents Play/House, a collaboration of works by Claire Joyce and Garth Johnson.  Featuring a mixture of ceramics, glitter paintings, works on paper and mixed media installations, the exhibition will run from January 31st through March 4th.

Husband and wife Garth Johnson and Claire Joyce live, work and make art in Eureka, California.  As they are in marriage, their work is capable of cohabitation—creating an exhibition that will examine the subject of domesticity and the trappings of tradition found both in art making and in marriage.

Viewed and considered separately, Joyce and Johnson’s works appear to be vastly different in approach and technique. When examined in the same space, it becomes apparent that the two artists share a deep interest in challenging and subverting traditional means of producing art and an excitement about how these traditions are reflected in contemporary society.

Claire Joyce creates scenes based on specific images from art history and re-imagines them as comments on domesticity, fertility, and feminine roles. Inserting herself into each splintered portrait of a woman points to both the freedom and weighty responsibility felt in marriage. Rather than executing these obsessive narratives in paint, Joyce chooses glitter to render her imagery. It is not a painting, but an image made from tiny specs of reflective color—though the glitter sparkles and seems to emit light, one cannot escape the fact that it is a frivolous craft material most often associated with sororities, Martha Stewart, and grade school valentines.

Garth Johnson utilizes conventional ceramic forms, such as the teapot, to both embrace and mock imagery and forms derived from ceramic history. In an effort to further examine these common domestic objects, Johnson reconstructs the teapot using casts made from bottles commonly found in contemporary American homes.  In his hand mouthwash, shampoo, and syrup bottles become totemic domestic objects, merged with handles and spouts appropriated from silver-plated tea and coffee pots. His practice also revolves around porcelain souvenirs and commemorative objects such as collector plates. In Johnson’s hands, banal plates rescued from thrift shops are transformed into humor—(and occasionally tragedy) laden vignettes of American cultural entropy.

In addition to Joyce’s glitter paintings and Johnson’s ceramic objects, this exhibition will contain a collaborative three-dimensional installation that ties the themes of the two artists together.

HSU First Street Gallery will present a Gallery Talk by the artists on Saturday, February 18th at 3 p.m.  The public is invited to meet the artists as they guide attendees through their exhibition.  Admission is free to all.

A reception for Claire Joyce and Garth Johnson will be held Saturday February 4th during Eureka’s monthly Arts Alive event. Celebrating its fourteenth year of service to HSU students and to the North Coast community, Humboldt State University First Street Gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. and is located at 422 First Street, Eureka, California.  Admission is free. Those planning group tours are encouraged to call ahead.  For more information call  707-443-6363.

Watch the Documentary

My Romance With Handicraft is Finished…. 
This Time For Good.

In the spring of 2000, I took a thrift store plate with a tiny, low-relief bird on it and added the above statement in a speech bubble coming out of the bird’s mouth. This plate, created as an afterthought, has become a touchstone that I have returned to time and again throughout my career. Like anyone involved in the crafts, I struggle with process. I push against the boundaries of the materials and processes that I use while simultaneously pushing against the limita­tions of my own hands.

 
I choose to work in porcelain. It might be more accurate to say that porcelain chose me. What other material can evoke purity, luxury and family heirlooms one moment, while evoking mass-produced souvenirs and trinkets the next. I have paid my respects at the site of the imperial kilns in Jingdezhen, China, and I have also marveled at bustling porcelain factories like Buffalo China.
 
Parallel to my own material explorations in porcelain, I explore the culture of porcelain—from the baroque ornamentation and excesses of Capodimonte to the geometric Art Deco stylings of Norita­ke. I am perhaps most drawn, however, to porcelain’s association with commemoration and nostal­gia. My collector plate interventions are part of a long line of art détournements that stretch from ancient graffiti to Guy Debord and the Situationists and current “culture jammers” like the Billboard Liberation Front. Language is an important component of these works. The resonance of language to the imagery of the plate is my chief goal.
 
My porcelain vessels are assembled from slipcast plastic bottles and handles and spouts from silver coffee and teapots. On the surface, these vessels could be taken as a commentary on consumerism and our disposable society. However, I am more interested in the formal qualities of plastic bottles. The flattened form of soap and syrup bottles are sophisticated and beautiful works of design that hold their contents while advertising themselves through labels integrated into their form. The plas­tic bottle can be seen as spiritual heir to the Italian Albarello--.

My recent vessel work is centered on themes of place and production. For the past two years, I have spent the summer in China, working with age-old porcelain production methods in a mod­ern setting. My Chinese work explores themes of slippage in meaning through cultural differences. Chinese porcelain decoration is filled with playful use of language and iconography. My work purposefully mistranslates this system of coded communication into an American vernacular, trading American pop culture for traditional Chinese imagery.
 
Porcelain’s formal qualities have made it a perfect vessel for meaning and commentary since its inven­tion nearly a millennium ago. I continue to struggle with my own technical skills, as well as what it means to be a maker in the 21st Century. My romance with handicraft has only just begun.

Garth Johnson
Winter, 2012

After a middleclass childhood spent beading, sewing, knotting, drawing, cross-stitching, and paper snowflake snipping, I have developed a vested interest in the use of materials often relegated to the category of craft.  Personal associations with craft begin at an early age when we are first handed a bottle of Elmer’s glue. Our craft materials, as our motor skills and social awareness, are later pushed towards more refined exercises.  While most people were raised making crafts, once grown they only seem to dabble during holidays or on special occasions so that many people who craft, like attending church, could be called Easter and Christmas crafters.  Artist Mike Kelley, himself interested in craft associations, said, “In my working-class background, the most invisible things were crafts.” It is the invisibility of craft materials that make them such strong social signifiers—they have, until recently, rarely been examined for ethnographic significance, but the overwhelming presence of craft materials and activities in America make them ripe with associative meaning.  
  
Using materials capable of referencing broad life experiences—from childhood naivety or giggling sorority girl activities to domestic practices of adulthood—my work is created with the identifiable patterns, surfaces, and textures of craft works.  To counteract and confuse the reading of craft media, I use these materials in exaggerated self-portraits that humorously meld my common life experience with art historical references.  This amalgam of narrative art historical imagery, utterly mundane contemporary objects, and staged scenes from my own life are carefully rendered using craft store glitter.  Multiple images of myself within these works allows me to play a variety of roles common to the  contemporary female expressed through the lens of art historical subjects. My intention in juxtaposing fantastical art postures with mundane feminine roles and base materials of crafting with refined obsession of art making, is to investigate the wit and grace which is capable of rising from the banal and ordinary.

Claire Joyce
Winter, 2012