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POWELL, Wyo. - An exhibit of work by seven ceramists from the Red Lodge Clay Center in Montana, opens Tuesday, Feb. 7, with an artists’ reception at 7:30 p.m. at Northwest Gallery in Powell.
This is the fifth year Red Lodge Clay Center ceramists have exhibited at NWC, bringing together artists with distinct styles from disparate parts of the country.
“NWC Presents—The Red Lodge Clay Center’s Current Resident Artists” is a combination of functional and decorative ceramics that includes both wheel-thrown and hand-built pieces.
Featured resident artists this year are Undine Brod, Katie Coughlin, Andrew Gilliatt and Andrea Moon. Also contributing to the exhibit are Red Lodge Clay Center Executive Director David Hiltner, Programming and Facilities Coordinator Markus Urbanik, and Gallery Coordinator Jill Foote-Hutton.
Viewers will find a spectrum of work that stretches from functional to purely fun and from colorful to rustic.
Brod creates mixed-media sculptures in the form of nonspecific animals that “exist as representations of emotional states in unparticular moments.” Coughlin creates objects to prompt nostalgia, saying she yearns for the “romance of bygone eras that invoke a sense of grandeur and elegance.”
Gilliatt, who creates functional pottery, says he is fascinated how we “personalize and define ourselves through the objects we use and accumulate.” On the other hand, Moon creates structures embodying negative space to question emptiness and fulfillment simultaneously, what she calls a “fulfillment of balance and order, but also an emptiness of ironic volume.”
Hiltner says his interest in rural landscapes, silos, rolling hills and furrowed fields translates into the patterns and textures of his vessels, while Urbanik describes each of his pots as a study of proportion in full volumetric forms, suggesting “buoyancy or even a possible weightlessness of presence, as if suspended over a small fulcrum point.”
Foote-Hutton in her art explores the “interminable distance between one human and another,” exploring “ideas about what makes a monster, a god or an innocent.”
The Red Lodge Clay Center exhibit is displayed through Friday, March 2, in Northwest Gallery. Located in the Cabre Building on the Northwest College campus, the gallery is open from 9 a.m.-4 p.m. weekdays and Thursday evenings from 7-9 p.m. Admission is free.
