Your future, our focus
An exhibit of work by seven ceramists from the Red Lodge Clay Center in Montana opens Tuesday, Jan. 16, with a 4:30 p.m. artists’ reception at Northwest College’s Northwest Gallery in Powell.
This is the 10th year Red Lodge Clay Center ceramists have exhibited their work at NWC, bringing together artists with distinct styles from many different regions throughout the country.
The exhibit showcases a combination of functional and decorative ceramics that include both wheel-thrown and hand-built pieces.
Featured resident artists this year are Kelsey Bowen, Matt Fiske, Crista Ames and Allison Cochran.
Viewers will discover a wide variety of work that spans from purely fun to colorful and rustic.
Bowen, of Oakland, California, notes that she finds an unparalleled personal release in creating art with clay.
“Working with my forms and creating these brief moments for myself are my last lingering stitches of childhood and a way to connect myself to what is no longer my tangible reality,” Bowen explains. “For a moment, the fantastical objects in my world are alive, and the stories I am telling are curiously real.”
Fiske, originally from Carbondale, Illinois, finds his passion within the intersection of ceramics, geology and material science. Experimentation is a crucial part of his studio practice, and he works to manipulate common materials using uncommon firing conditions.
Currently a resident of Missoula, Montana, Ames notes that her work, “seeks to visualize the distortions of memory and the sensation of transitive or dissociative states of mind.” Working primarily in ceramics and textiles, she explores the ways humans establish and sustain personal relationships.
Cochran, who hails from Cincinnati, Ohio, shares that she uses ceramics “as a way to question the contemporary standards our culture has set through the influence of the media.” She notes she’s interested in the way advertising images affect society’s subconscious ideas about gender characteristics and body image. Cochran is currently working to create porcelain vessels that are designed to aid in the act of self-control with food.
Also contributing to the exhibit are Red Lodge Clay Center staffers David Hiltner, Sean O’Connell and Ernest Ford.
The Red Lodge Clay Center exhibit is displayed through Friday, March 2, in the Northwest Gallery. Located in the Cabre Building on the NWC campus, the gallery is open from 9 a.m.-4 p.m. weekdays and Thursday evenings from 7-9 p.m. Admission is free.
For more information about this event, contact Denise Kelsay, art and galleries coordinator, at NWC, at denise.kelsay@nwc.edu or 307-754-6499.