Art Reviews: Clay Place displays the influences that mold artists

Wednesday, May 09, 2001

By Mary Thomas, Post-Gazette Art Critic

Over the years, Jerry Caplan, well-known Pittsburgh ceramist and professor emeritus at Chatham College, has conducted several workshops at Logan Clay Products in Logan, Ohio, one of only three clay-pipe manufacturers in the country. Participants had the opportunity to manipulate the huge industrial forms while the clay was wet and to fire completed work at the factory.

"Jerry Caplan & Students: Terra-cotta Pipe Sculpture" at The Clay Place in Shadyside pays homage to those days and shows the variety of expression that can be coaxed out of a standardized product. Scale is often a prominent feature of industrial production, and timidity must be left at the door to get the most out of the experience.

Caplan's sculpture is part of the landscape of Chatham and Downtown, and his pipe works -- their tall, cylindrical base shape usually evident within his alterations -- may be seen on the Pitt campus and sprouting in the occasional Shadyside garden. The colorful abstracted figure within his "Vertical Collage" -- seen in the show -- is playful and experimental.

A dozen students -- there would have been more if they could have found a way to ship the heavy artworks -- have transformed pipes into vessels, masks and standing figures. For "High Tide," Denise Romecki has stretched the clay into a sweeping blue wave.

Carole Stremple's "Queen for a Day" is an engaging work with a finely sculpted face and blazing red (acrylic, not glaze) dress. Barbara Hosack Kindler also alters surface, giving her unlikely but believable tail-standing "Salmon" a bronzed patina. The naturalistic pike and gar fish by Mary Beth Steisslinger are instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with Pennsylvania waters and make up an impressive school. Ted Soens' standing man and untitled critter have warm humor.

The sculpture that most thoroughly and effectively takes advantage of the factory environment is "Guarding Sensuality," a forceful 5-foot-high arch of embellished combined forms by Kyle Hallam.

Sculpture by Elizabeth Donohue, Tim Stavenger, Eva Rase, Jeff Kohut, Dale Huffman, Pat Winter and Mary Holl, wife of Logan Clay Products' president, round out the exhibition.

Hannah Niswonger, a onetime resident of Pittsburgh, is one of the most creative and adept ceramists shown here regularly. The handbuilt works in "Travels in the Middle Kingdom: Images from a Trip through China," based on an actual trip last summer, are a fresh way to interpret a culture and landscape that is both familiar and foreign.

Besides subject matter -- such as rice paddies or a motorcycle taxi -- Niswonger was also inspired by Chinese ceramic history -- for example, her use of bas-relief, or the traditional green and orange glaze colors of the terrific "Water Buffalo." Sometimes the glazes are too dominant, as the thick yellow on a chick; others, like that of the "Chartreuse Cat," make a good piece even better. The "Melon Vendor on the Yangtze River" sold fruit "that tasted like honeydew" during a ferry crossing; the artwork is just as sweet.

Gallery director Elvira Peake also has given a temporary home to the eight award winners from the "Small Sculpture 2001" exhibition sponsored by the National Society of Arts and Letters, Pittsburgh Chapter. Works range from first-place winner Naomi Falk's mysterious casting of negative space "Handpool" (a like piece; the original will be part of a national NSAL exhibition which opens at the Carnegie on May 18) to funky yarn "Glandular Cozies" by Rebecca Vaughan.