Jenny Harris on Woody De Othello
For his solo exhibition “Hope Omens,” Woody De Othello has reworked John Michael Kohler’s Victorian Italianate parlor residence right into a sensuous, colourful sanctuary. Seventeen vessels displayed on customized pedestals—virtually all ceramic—are put in throughout six rooms with brightly painted partitions: the primary a French blue and the remaining a glowing marigold. The sculptures are anthropomorphic types that includes a smattering of bodily appendages. Othello made them from molds he produced throughout his Kohler Arts Heart arts/trade pottery residency, which supplied him uncommon entry to the industrial-scale kilns (and high-quality clays and glazes) of the Kohler Firm, a producing agency greatest identified for the manufacturing of porcelain lavatory fixtures equivalent to sinks, bathtubs, and bogs. Othello is a ceramicist who locations experimentation with supplies and processes on the coronary heart of his observe, so the residency was a pure match.
The works and their fastidiously thought-about set up insist on an consciousness of 1’s physique as a sensory vessel, and of the clay vessels themselves as animate, even religious issues. Because the title of the present suggests, these corporeal objects are infused with a prophetic power that radiates by house. With their shiny, iridescent, and vivid glazes, their surfaces are visually placing. But their fleshy protrusions—lips, ears, noses, and arms—assert different modes of sensual consumption. Generally Othello evokes nonvisual senses by the inclusion of precise or sculpted objects. In Beginning Off (all works 2021), for instance, the outside types—a espresso mug and the 2 arms cupping it—evoke each style and contact, whereas the inside cavity, full of partially burned wax candles, emits an imaginary odor. Elsewhere, Othello executes this impact by displacing physique components: In Sealed, a pair of side-by-side ears perched above a set of pursed lips substitute sound for sight. In Openness, arms resemble toes, arms change into legs, and the top itself is absent, implied solely by the inclusion of a pair of ceramic headphones perched as if slung over a shoulder.
Whereas lots of the sculptures explicitly consult with intimate types of tactile embrace—arms clasp different arms or caress the floor of the vessel physique—all of them indicate tactility by their irregularly modeled surfaces, indexes of the artist working the clay. That Othello foregrounds such haptic qualities invitations questions on his relationship to Kohler’s industrial services: What occurs when an artist who relishes the unpredictable, back-and-forth interface between artist physique and clay physique encounters processes designed to streamline mass manufacturing and decrease irregularity?
Throughout his residency, Othello experimented for the primary time with slip casting, a method by which liquefied clay (on this case, vitreous china) is poured right into a plaster mildew and left to type a skinny, skin-like layer, the solid. The strategy may be seen in simply three of the works included within the exhibition: the sculptural pedestals comprised of brick-like types stacked, considerably precariously, as in a recreation of Jenga. Although every sculpture contains a pedestal and a vessel, these parts are made individually. Right here, the three slip-cast bases seem texturally distinct: Their surfaces are smoother and extra viscous, their colour extra uniform. When his residency was minimize brief due to the pandemic, Othello returned to Oakland, California, the place he lives. There, he made virtually the entire works for the exhibition by abandoning the slip-casting approach, returning to the usage of stone clay, and changing the Kohler molds into press molds (by which the clay is pushed into the mildew reasonably than poured), his selections favoring flexibility, uncertainty, and the variation of each supplies and course of.
Whereas the surfaces of Othello’s works draw consideration to the interface between artist and materials, their set up insists on linking the house of the art work to that of the viewer. Extending the immersive qualities of the wall paint and sculpted pedestals, Othello commissioned Cheflee, an Oakland-based musician, to compose a soothing soundscape impressed by the works. The rating’s overlapping tracks are punctuated by a variety of soppy, electronically blended, ASMR-like sounds—sluggish respiration, static crackling, birds chirping, and paper rustling—a few of which emanate from the vessels themselves. Within the opening gallery, one such work rests on a picket bench-cum-pedestal, its sounds beckoning the viewer beside it to an intimate tête-à-tête. Othello’s efforts to activate the interiors of his works mirror his fascination with Central African nkisi—objects imbued with religious forces and valued for his or her therapeutic properties. They likewise level to the exhibition’s bigger purpose to stage a constellation of talismanic objects—what the artist calls “hope omens”—that activate our bodies by the sensuous and soothing properties of labored clay.
— Jenny Harris
