It’s a moment from one’s childhood that becomes a primal imprint. We were suddenly out in the warm LA backyard twilight. Dad had us all looking straight upward, scanning, scanning. He grabbed my shoulder and pointed when he saw it and I think I saw it too. It was not a bird. Not a plane. Not a shooting star. I’d seen all of those. This was different: a glinting dot moving in a speedy soundless arc directly overhead!
What makes a piece of art compelling for me is primarily Wonder. As in it fills me with Wonder (amazement at beauty, uniqueness, ineffability) and makes me Wonder (curiosity about technique, backstory, message.) With a quest for wonderfulness in mind, I set out to find the artworks at the current Pajaro Valley Arts Gallery HOME Exhibit which carried me away into their worlds whether I fully understood them or not. Pieces that called up more questions than answered them. Pieces that pushed the idea of HOME into new shapes.
What do you get when you cross a hand-built ceramic incinerator sculpture with Sputnik-era Soviet propoganda-style graphics featuring Cyrillic lettering?
Give up?
I don’t know either, but let’s poke at it and find out.
The “HOME” Exhibit opened today and I scooted myself down to Watsonville to see it before the hoards assemble on Sunday for the reception. If I have learned one thing about Art Receptions it’s that they are not really about seeing the art. So I go earlier and usually alone in order to metaphorically sit myself down and let the works talk to me.
“All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.”
–Federico Fellini
So, there’s this: A ceramic incinerator sculpture that I ended up calling “Homefire 1957.” Other than perhaps a bomb shelter sculpture to exorcise my childhood’s deep fear of being annihilated in a nuclear war, nothing else quite portrays what was happening in my domestic and cosmic home at that time more than this piece. Yeah, it’s autobiographical.
UPDATE: This sad tale of ceramic breakage with a happily-repaired ending was first published January 21, 2012. I DID make the hangtags I refer to within, but I wound up keeping this sentimental piece. It deserved a good home: mine!
