P•P•O•W is pleased to present
Tie Me to the Mast,
a solo exhibition by Annabeth Rosen, a distinguished sculptor in the
community of West Coast ceramicists. Her work explores the fundamental
properties of
ceramics by directly confronting the aesthetic and chemical
relationships between sculptural form and painterly surface. Rosen’s
formally intuitive process is enabled by a complex understanding of
historical conventions, composite materials, and chemical properties,
placing her work in the tradition of experimental ceramicists including
Peter Voulkos, Betty Woodman, Linda Benglis, and Martin Puryear.

 

The
exhibition, her first with the gallery, will feature a series of
small-scale ceramic sculptures, elaborate organic forms that reveal
layer upon layer of clay,
glaze, and salt, fired using a ‘salt flux’ technique, which triggers a
self-glazing reaction. A signature innovation to this centuries-old
technique, through this process Rosen mixes surface chemistry into the
body of her work, creating a solid mass whose
glaze rises to the fore during the firing process. Rejecting historical
standards that distinguish decorative arts as ‘perfect’, Rosen’s
practice can be described as an effort to undermine established
conventions about an object’s merit, resulting in an extensive
body of work that embraces the challenges of a robust studio practice:
precarious balance, fissured surfaces, and accumulated fragments.

 

Among the works on view will be
Roil,
a large-scale sculptural work of individual ceramic forms, piled on top
of one another like layered gestures. Each individual piece is painted,
and together the work takes
on the effect of an abstract painting, ‘framed’ in a custom pedestal
made of metal. Pieced together, the work appears as if in motion, a
swirling, cascading form, seemingly driven by an inner velocity.

 

Rosen
describes the ceramic process for her as breaking down the barrier
between the visual and sensual. Her works invite not only an aesthetic
evaluation, but a
physical one as well. Creating works that appear as if caught in a
state of motion, the sculptures evoke a visceral response in the viewer,
inviting them to investigate the cracks and cervices visible on the
work’s surface. Interested in the way in which the
clay changes through being worked and formed, Rosen pushes the limits
of the material, building up works, firing them, adding new elements,
firing them again, and so on, exploiting the clay to create cracks in
the surface of the finished work that exposes
the nature of the materials.

 

“My
work represents a tally of touches that are informed by years of
deliberate working experience,” said Rosen. “My process may allude to a
desire to blur contemporary
experience into something timeless and familiar, like ceramics itself. I
engage in both recklessness and thoughtfulness at the same time,
embracing the awkward and the unfinished, the partial and the raw.”

 

Though
her works appear organic, found, or formed, masses of clay
un-heroically yielding to the weight of their material, Rosen’s work is
deliberate. Through the
process of creating her ceramic works, Rosen often breaks them, a
practice that she finds as interesting as the creation itself, as it
reveals the possibility and potency of a shard. She fires and re-fires
her work, interested in both the change in material
as the work accumulates mass, as well as the way the physical material
can be negotiated – its limits pushed, while simultaneously pushing the
limits of what a sculpture can be.

 

Born
in Brooklyn, New York, Rosen received her BFA from NYS State College of
Ceramics at Alfred University and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of
Art. She was recently
announced as a 2016 recipient of a United States Artists fellowship.
She has been the Robert Arneson Endowed Chair at the University of
California Davis since 1997.  Rosen has taught at School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, Rhode Island School of Design,
Tyler School of Art and Bennington College. Rosen has received multiple
grants and awards, a Pew Fellowship, two National Endowment for the
Arts Fellowships, several UC Davis Research Grants, and a Joan Mitchell
Award for Painting and Sculpture. Rosen’s work
is in the collection of the LA County Museum of Art, The Oakland Museum
of Art, The Denver Art Museum, and The Everson Museum, as well as
public and private collections throughout the country.
Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped, Rosen’s first
major survey chronicling 20 years of her work in ceramics and drawing,
will open at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in August of 2017. She
is represented by Anglim Gilbert Gallery
in San Francisco.