Keith Schneider, HSU ceramics instructor, writes that the pot’s form represents a wide range of choices for the artist. “The Teapot Show offers our ceramic students an opportunity to show how they interpret the idea of “teapot”. The Teapot form offers functional and abstract potters a design challenge. Where the handle is placed on a teapot, what the handle is made from – clay, wood, metal, bamboo – as well as handle size and proportional relationships, placement of spout, type and shape of lid, and decoration and glaze, provide never ending opportunities for invention and change.
“It is this fascination with the juxtaposition of spout, lid, handle, foot, and body that challenges potters, from their first attempts as students, to combine these elements to create a teapot that not only functions well, but has a pleasing sense of design. In addition, all kinds of clay forming techniques can be utilized on one piece: extruded handles, pinched feet, thrown bodies, slab bases, etc. These all offer the clayworker an unlimited range of possibilities for innovation.
These teapots were selected from submissions from Intermediate and Advanced level ceramic students. A reception is scheduled for Friday, April 10 from 5 to 7 p.m. during Arts Arcata.
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In the Karshner Lounge, Daniel Lofredo’s large-scale mixed media paintings will be on display in an exhibit entitled “Complications.”
According to Lofredo, the deceptive complexity of the world inspired him when working on this project. “Complications explores the tendency of simple things to become complicated; how the world we live in is not just one, but many worlds interacting, separate but connected, in a system that gets more complex every minute— a world in which we are relentlessly faced with miles of red tape behind which sense is constantly lost in favor of logic― where all absurdity is quantified, put into complex codes of elaborate symbols and filed into the absent cabinets of oblivion, where it waits, quietly, patiently, for the well announced but elusive apocalyptic end to it all.
“An attempted explanation of the times; a visual epistemology; a sensory cataloguing of the nature of human life in the post-industrial age of fine distinctions and fabricated problems―In our times we can boil everything down to it’s construct form, these constructs will fill your walls with texture and make you project sense all over them.”
Lofredo hosts a reception with live music by local band Nu on Friday, April 10, from 6 to 9 p.m. during Arts Arcata.
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In the Art Building’s Foyer Gallery, Lizzy Dostal presents paintings and ceramic. “My current body of work focuses on urban landscape paintings that incorporate elements of realism and abstraction,” Dostal writes.
“Included in my work is a series of ceramic sculptures that deal with the decomposition of architectural buildings found in the urban setting.
“They allow me to express ideas of our society and how focused we are on architectural structures, how reliant we are upon man made freeways and how we have this compulsion to develop every plot of land. My most current works include portraits of foreclosed houses in urban settings as a symbolic reference to our current economic state.
“In my ceramics I am exploring how we are affecting the environment we live in. Some of my pieces reference what will happen to our society once we have exhausted our resources or once everything has fallen apart. In the past it has proven difficult for me to articulate my thoughts exactly, however while producing this body of work I have an even clearer understanding of my direction and intention.”
Dostal hosts a reception on Friday, April 10 from 6 to 8 p.m. during Arts Arcata.