From left to right: Shannon Goff, Sourpuss, 2017; Lauren Mabry, Lasso, 2019; Peter Christian Johnson, Jilted, 2019.

Breaking the Plane
Shannon Goff, Peter Christian Johnson, Lauren Mabry
Opening Reception | Friday, October 11, 2019 | 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Exhibition on view through November 8, 2019

The Jane Hartsook Gallery is pleased to present Breaking the Plane, an exhibition of new work by Shannon Goff, Peter Christian Johnson, and Lauren Mabry. This show brings together three artists who are using clay and glaze to create lines that cannot be confined to two-dimensions. Goff and Mabry challenge the fundamentally two-dimensional form of the line by using clay to draw in the round. Mabry and Johnson thwart expectations by separating glaze from the ceramic surface and giving it volumetric form, while Goff and Johnson use a density of three-dimensional lines to give their “drawings” mass.

Shannon Goff’s ceramic work embraces abstraction and is heavily rooted in the practice of drawing. Through continued experimentation, she strives to repurpose the perceived limits of her medium into possibilities. Goff begins her sculptures as meditative doodles, but current events and images often co-opt them. She addresses themes of containment, collapse, landscape, and structure in these sculpted drawings with an aesthetic sensibility that often belies the seriousness of her subject matter. Drawing out loud helps Goff understand how to best navigate the built and natural environments of contemporary society’s tumultuous terrain.

Peter Christian Johnson creates architecturally-inspired material studies that represent the tragic beauty he sees as the human condition. He laboriously sketches out scaffolding in porcelain, encouraging it to warp in the kiln by using the weight of volumetric glaze to collapse and shift the finished object. For Johnson, the collapsing forms evoke a sense of sorrow and distortion that is emblematic of the various burdens we carry.

Lauren Mabry uses clay and glaze to draw and paint in three dimensions, creating a feeling of mystery and surprise that forces every viewer—no matter their ceramic knowledge—to engage with the material and try to piece together her making process. Mabry likens her process to building with Tinkertoys. She extrudes coils and fires them, using wet clay to connect the hard pieces and firing them again before adding rings of pure glaze. Over time Mabry has been learning how to anticipate the distortion the kiln introduces in her work, but the process will always remain a careful balance between intentionality and the freedom of surprise.

Download the press release here.