Katie Truk: Stretched Sculpture
Katie Truk wants to prove pantyhose are more than just a torture device for women. Truk is a multi-media artist who creates colorful, enchanting three-dimensional work with pantyhose, wire, a sewing needle and thread.
This exhibition highlights recent ceramic sculptures by Elisa D’Arrigo. These small objects, while not specifically figures, have a presence that suggests living bodies, with arm-like appendages and orifices implying hidden interiors. Their endearing eccentricity commands our attention.
D’Arrigo works improvisationally, allowing the forms to reveal themselves as she creates them. Beginning with an array of hollow, mostly cylindrical forms she hand-builds from clay slabs, D’Arrigo combines and manipulates them while wet. She thinks of this process as a dialogue with the piece: “I play with these forms, combining, taking apart, recombining; all the while seeking a configuration that speaks to me…Making work is both excavation and discovery — I look for something from the piece that I can both recognize yet be surprised by or even become uncomfortable with.”
This dialogue extends to D’Arrigo’s adventurous and experimental glazing process, which often involve numerous layers and refirings. She is especially intrigued by the way glazes can radically transform the character of a piece. The multi-colored and textured surfaces of her pieces seem almost painterly, with their dots, drips, dimples, streaks, and stripes.
It may be paradoxical to think of small ceramic sculptures as “making moves,” since their material substance is hard and fixed, yet they embody a kind of tension that implies movement—either arrested, or about to happen. D’Arrigo explains, “the pieces are often taking a stance or in a paused position between moves and their positions record or express my own transitory states of mind.”
In one sense, “Making Moves” might describe the artist’s process in building these works, but it also hints at the movement these inanimate objects might be capable of—at least in our imaginations. As visitors make their own moves around the sculptures and observe radically different views of each one, they may visualize the pieces moving and transforming before their eyes.