Alva Mooses, Composition IV, Composition V, ceramic, 2022-2023.

Ceramics Now
Beth Campbell, Cathy Lu,
Alva Mooses, Shellyne Rodriguez
July 14 – Aug 18, 2023
In- Person Artist Reception: July 14, 2023 | 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.

NEW YORK – The Jane Hartsook Gallery is pleased to present work by our 2022 fellows and artists in residence: Beth Campbell, Cathy Lu, Alva Mooses, and Shellyne Rodriguez. Our Residency and Fellowship program fosters artistic growth by providing makers with a creative community, time, space and materials to explore and generate new bodies of work in ceramics in vibrant New York City.

Beth Campbell is a New York-based artist who creates drawings, sculptures, and architectural interventions that challenge our perception of the world by reworking everyday objects in surprising or startling ways. She employs mass-produced consumer items, often in repetition, to make apparent the way we use these items to construct our identities. During her residency, Campbell experimented with doing “burn outs” where she coated natural materials in clay and then fired them so the organic material burns away but leaves its form and texture behind in ceramic.

 Cathy Lu is a California-based artist who explores experiences of immigration and cultural hybridity from an Asian American point of view. Lu creates sculptures and installations that often draw from traditional Chinese imagery and objects to problematize what it means to be both Asian and American without being fully accepted by either culture. During her fellowship, Lu worked on a project called American Dream Pillows, inspired by pillows made during the Tang dynasty that were believed to be able to influence both the dreams and the future of the user. She created ceramic pillows that meditated on Asian American experiences, specifically the tension between the American dream and the lived experience.

Alva Mooses is an interdisciplinary artist. Her works across printed media, ceramics, and sculpture question how colonialism and capitalism have marked land, language, and human migration. She engages with earth-based materials to create an index of place and signal the memory of geological time. During her residency, Mooses developed a body of work based on a globe of the earth which she reconfigured in slip-cast porcelain. She experimented with multiple kiln firings and magma glazes resulting in an array of colors and textures. Her ceramic sculptures move away from the historical representation of the earth as a perfect sphere on a steady axis; toward a transformative body that centers on the materiality of clay.

Shellyne Rodriguez is a Bronx-based artist, educator, writer, and community organizer who works in a variety of media, including drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture. Rodriguez pairs the aesthetics of the Baroque and of hip-hop culture to depict the contemporary conditions of alienation and perseverance, especially as it relates to her community in the South Bronx. During her residency, Rodriguez created a series of ceramic reliefs that focused on the disappearing and increasingly dispossessed people and places of her community in the South Bronx.

Images below: Alan Wiener, courtesy Greenwich House Pottery 2023.