Jay Kvapil: Recent Landscapes
April 13 – May 25, 2024
Opening reception for the artist: Saturday, April 13th, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
Diane Rosenstein Gallery is pleased to announce an installation of ceramics by California-based potter Jay Kvapil. For his third solo exhibition with our gallery, the artist will show a new suite of glazed rock forms created in his studio on the Sonoma Coast.
The artist writes, ‘At first read these new “rock” pieces might seem to be a departure from earlier vessels, but in fact, the “rock” series deals with many of the same ideas: ceramic vessels, highly glazed that create landscapes. However, the imaginary landscapes on the surface of earlier vessels have now become invented rocks that are themselves landscapes. Form and surface merge. The pictorial elements and the forms are one, just the way a small stone might reflect the entire landscape from which it is plucked.
For more than a decade now my work has centered on landscapes. Increasingly, they are not re-creations or interpretations of what the eyes see in the distance, but rather metaphorical landscapes seen in the mind’s eye—the space we travel through, not the physical world that we gaze upon in the distance.
These rock pieces start with partial plaster molds taken from rocks I’ve collected. Clay slabs made from those molds are “stitched” together facet by facet to make new “rocks,” taking the rough form of vessels—a process analogous to the computer stitching of photos. Physical materials are taken from the earth (landscape) and made into a new landscape, with the forms being just as imaginary as the surfaces.
Like earlier work, I use raw ceramic glaze materials in abnormal ways and force the materials to melt, fuse, bubble, crawl, and drip in the firing—with the result being somewhere between chaos and control. Often there is dissonance in both color and form, where forms sometimes look like parts of a whole, and colors are intentionally jarring at times. In the way that two disharmonious musical notes played together create a shrill sound—think Thelonius Monk — I place complementary colors side by side to create dissonance.
Over the years the glazes have become more extreme, to the point that they intentionally question the line between the beautiful and the abject. Each piece is fired multiple times, applying more glazes and raw materials in successive firings until the result pleases me or the piece is destroyed. The final work becomes a minimally controlled experiment that is a narration of the process.’
Jay Kvapil (USA, b. 1951) is a potter and educator based in California. He has received recent solo exhibitions at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles; Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami; Galerie Lefebrve & Fils, Paris; and Couturier Gallery, Los Angeles. Jay Kvapil graduated from University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA in 1973, and between 1974 and 1975 studied tea ceremony ware at the Takatori Seizan Pottery in the island of Kyushu in Southern Japan. After returning to the United States, he obtained his MA (1979) and MFA (1981) from San Jose State University, in California.
He taught at the University of Hawaii (1984), then moved to California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) in 1986, where for thirty-five years he served a variety of roles, including Professor of Art (Ceramics) and Director of the School of Art. His work was included in group exhibitions at The Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (1980), Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), ATLA and GAVLAK, Los Angeles, and The Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach. The artist lives and works in Long Beach and Sonoma.
